LOOK far enough, and we see him, a wanderer with his little family, starting from the heart of Asia, hunting and fishing as they go, camping for a few years or a century in one place, moving on when their number increases and food is not enough for all, or when some other tribe comes up behind and drives them on,—moving on, and on, and on,—a few families at a time or hundreds together. They belong, as all the American “Indians” do, to one great human stock that spread out east and west along the northern lands of Asia and Europe, where their closest kin to-day are found among the tribes of North Siberia and the Lapps of Russia and Norway. Another branch of the same ancestral stock settled in China, where it made many new inventions and slowly built up a civilization of its own, with high achievements in literature and art. But our “Indians” must have broken away long before that, for they had none of these inventions to bring with them,—not even that of the wheel, either for vehicles, for spinning, or for pottery; though the wheel was in common use among the Chinese and other old-world races thousands of years ago. Let us watch these first men coming, now, and see what they are like. They are a shaggy-looking folk, with bear-skins thrown over their shoulders and tied round their waists. Their hair hangs long and black. Their skin is dark. They have little baggage. They bring nothing with them except spears, bows and arrows, and furs. For a spear they have fixed a pointed bone or horn or sharp broken stone to the end of a pole. Their arrows are just little spears. The furs are the skins of bear, walrus, seal and caribou. When we ourselves start on a journey, we know where we are going; we are bound for some particular place with a name. But these first wanderers from Asia don’t know where they are going, and don’t much care. They are not looking for a place to settle down in, land of their own to farm, to build a house on. So long as they find plenty of wild beasts, berries and roots to eat, they are satisfied. They know how to make fire, by twirling a stick between their hands till its lower end, by friction against another piece of dry wood, kindles a spark which they catch on dry bark or moss and blow into flame. They have neither pottery nor baskets, but carry small articles in a big bowl-shaped receptacle of rawhide. Their only animal is the dog, the half-tamed descendant of foxes, wolves or jackals. These first comers have “discovered America,” without knowing it. They have no idea that they are the first to set foot in a “new world.” It looks just like the “old-world” to them. They have been living on the sea-shore, over there at the tip of Asia. Their number has increased, and other tribes have come up behind them, so they have simply crossed over to the land they have often seen at a distance, where they can have the hunting all to themselves. They just go on living as they have been used to living.