In the face of such wild theorizing it is comforting to recall that the great Humboldt recognized as early as 1811 a “striking analogy between the Americans and the Mongol race.” We must pardon him for clinging to some vague notion of a primordial American race and declaring that the Indians were “a mixture of Asiatic tribes and the aborigines of this vast continent.”[6] Today science does not have all the answers to the anthropological problem which arose when Balboa discovered the Pacific and Magellan crossed it, thus dropping the world’s largest ocean in between the Americas and the Garden of Eden. So far as early man is concerned, we know a good deal about how he came, and whence, and a little about when. Except for the passionate protagonists of Atlantis and of its “opposite number,” the mythical land of Mu lost in the depths of the Pacific, most students agree that early man came across what is now Bering Strait—not by way of the Aleutians, for their inhospitable western tip is separated from Asia by 225 miles of sea with one small island midway between. For a long time, the Bering Strait route was supported only by _a priori_ reasoning, but of late years the weapons of early man have been found either alone or with the fossils of extinct mammals in parts of Alaska and north-west Canada. Bering Strait—Freeway to the New World Though early man from northern Asia certainly crossed in one area and in one area only, he may have made the crossing by any one of three methods. That depends on when he came. If he came rather late—say around 10,000 years ago—he had to negotiate Bering Strait, open water in summer, iced over in winter. If the migrants were a boating and fishing people voyaging north along the Asiatic shore, the 56-mile gap of Bering Strait, broken by the Diomede Islands, was a negligible barrier, since the greatest stretch of open water was only 23 miles across. If they found the strait frozen over, they would have followed the southern edge of the ice. Men of a more inland type, men less given to water travel, could have crossed to Alaska—as some do now—on the ice of winter.