Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1898: Volume 54, November 1898Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1898: Volume 54, November 1898
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
on the northwest coast of America. Records show a number of instances
of Japanese junks cast ashore on the Oregon coast and shores to the
north.[1]
It must be evidences of Japanese and not Chinese contact that we are
to look for--tangible evidences, for example, in the form of relics,
methods of burial, etc. That the Japanese bear resemblances to certain
northern people there can be no doubt. Dr. Torell brought before
the Swedish Anthropological Society, some years ago, the results
of a comparative study of Eskimo and Japanese. The anatomical and
ethnographical resemblances appeared so striking to him as to give
additional strength to the theory of the settlement of America from
Asia by way of Bering Strait. That there are certain resemblances
among individuals of different races we have abundant evidences. At a
reception in Philadelphia I introduced a Japanese commissioner (who had
been a Cambridge wrangler) to a full-blooded Omaha Indian dressed in our
costume, and the commissioner began a conversation with him in Japanese;
nor could he believe me when I assured him that it was an Indian that
he was addressing, and not one of his own countrymen. I was told by an
_attaché_ of the Japanese legation at Washington that after carefully
scrutinizing the features of a gentleman with whom he was traveling he
ventured to introduce himself as a fellow-countryman, and found to his
astonishment that the man was a native of the Malay Peninsula. That
the Malays bear a strong resemblance to the Chinese is quite true. Dr.
Baelz, of the Medical College of Japan, can find no differences between
the crania and pelves of the Chinese and Malays. Wallace assures us
that even the Malay of Java, when dressed as a Chinese, is not to be
distinguished from them, and Peschel classifies the Malays with the
Mongoloid people. In these approximate regions one might expect close
intermixtures. If resemblances are established between the Japanese and
the Eskimo, they would probably have arisen from a circumpolar race
which has left its traces on northern peoples the world around. We turn
naturally to Japan as the region from which a migration might reasonably
have been supposed to take place. Its position on the Asiatic coast
with a series of larger and smaller stepping-stones--the Kuriles--to
Kamchatka, and thence across the strait to America and seaward, the
broad and powerful Japanese current sweeping by its coast and across
the Pacific, arrested only by the northwestern coast of America. With
these various avenues of approach one might certainly expect evidences
of contact in past times. A somewhat extended study in Japan of its
prehistoric and early historic remains in the way of shell-heap pottery
from the north to the south, much of it of an exceedingly curious
character; the later stone implements, many of them of the most
extraordinary types; the bronze mirrors, swords, spear points, and the
so-called bronze bells; the wide distribution of a curious comma-shaped
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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