From those, and other discoveries of a like kind, this at least becomes apparent, that in the New World, as in the Old, the closing epoch of geology must be turned to for the initial chapters of archæology and ethnology. According to geological reckoning, much of the American continent has but recently emerged from the ocean. Among the organic remains of Canadian post-tertiary deposits are found the _Phoca_, _Balœna_, and other existing marine mammals and fishes along with the _Elephas primigenius_, the _Mastodon Ohioticus_, and other long-extinct species. Looking on the human skeletons of the Guadaloupe limestone in the Museums of London and Paris,—the first examples of the bones of man in a fossil state,—the gradation in form between him and other animals presents no very important contrast to the uninstructed eye. Modern though those rock-imbedded skeletons are, they accord with older traces of human remains mingling with those of extinct mammals, to which more recent speculations have given so novel an interest in relation to the question of the antiquity of man. The origin and duration of the American type still remain in obscurity. Man entered on the occupation of the New World in centuries which there, as elsewhere, stretch backward as we strive to explore them. His early history is lost, for it is not yet four centuries since its discovery; and he still survives there, as he then did, a being apart from all that specially distinguishes either the cultivated or the uncultured man of Europe. His continent, too, has become the stage whereon are being tested great problems in social science, in politics, and in ethnology. There the civilised man and the savage have been brought face to face to determine anew how far God “giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth; and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” There, too, the Black man and the Red, whose destinies seemed to separate them wide as the world’s hemispheres, have been brought together to try whether the African is more enduring than the indigenous American on his own soil; to try for us, also, as could no otherwise be tried, questions of amalgamation and hybridity, of development and perpetuity of varieties, of a dominant, a savage, and a servile race. In all ways: in its recoverable past, in its comprehensible present, in its conceivable future, the New World invites our study, with the promise of disclosures replete with interest in their bearing on secrets of the elder world. ----- [1] Vide _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_. [2] Morton: _Crania Americana_; Nott: _Indigenous Races_, etc. [3] _American Philosophical Transactions_, N. S. vol. iii. p. 248. [4] _Types of Mankind._ P. 352. [5] _Proceed. Acad. Nat. Sc. Philad._ Oct. 1846. P. 107. CHAPTER II. THE PRIMEVAL TRANSITION.