t seems strange to think of England
and France as ever having been inhabited by Eskimos. Facts equally
strange may be cited in abundance from zooelogy and botany. The camel is
found to-day only in Arabia and Bactria; yet in all probability the
camel originated in America,[17] and is an intruder into what we are
accustomed to call his native deserts, just as the people of the United
States are European intruders upon the soil of America. So the giant
trees of Mariposa grove are now found only in California, but there was
once a time when they were as common in Europe[18] as maple-trees to-day
in a New England village.

[Footnote 17: Wallace, _Geographical Distribution of Animals_,
vol. ii. p. 155.]

[Footnote 18: Asa Gray, "Sequoia and its History," in his
_Darwiniana_, pp. 205-235.]

[Sidenote: There was probably no connection or intercourse by water
between ancient America and the Old World.]

Familiarity with innumerable facts of this sort, concerning the
complicated migrations and distribution of plants and animals, has
entirely altered our way of looking at the question as to the origin of
the American Indians. As already observed, we can hardly be said to
possess sufficient data for determining whether they are descended from
the Pleistocene inhabitants of America, or have come in some later wave
of migration from the Old World. Nor can we as yet determine whether
they were earlier or later comers than the Eskimos. But since we have
got rid of that feeling of speculative necessity above referred to, for
bringing the red men from Asia within the historic period, it has become
more and more clear that they have dwelt upon American soil for a very
long time. The aboriginal American, as we know him, with his language
and legends, his physical and mental peculiarities, his social
observances and customs, is most emphatically a native and not an
imported article. He belongs to the American continent as strictly as
its opossums and armadillos, its maize and its golden-rod, or any
members of its aboriginal fauna and flora belong to it. In all
probability he came from the Old World at some ancient period, whether
pre-glacial or post-glacial, when it was possible to come by land; and
here in all probability, until the arrival of white men from Europe, he
remained undisturbed by later comers, unless the Eskimos may have been
such. There is not a particle of evidence to suggest any conne