But this uniformity in the condition of the aborigines, and the consequent resemblance in their arts, habits, and mode of life, has been the fruitful source of misleading assumptions. Everywhere the European explorer met only rude hunting and warring tribes, exhibiting such slight variations in all that first attracts the eye of the most observant traveller, that an exaggerated idea of their ethnical uniformity was the natural result. In the systematisings of the ethnologist, the American type was classed apart as at once uniform and distinctive; and, strange as it may now seem, this idea found nowhere such ready favour as among those who had the fullest access to the evidence by which its truth could be tested. It was the most comprehensive induction of the author of _Crania Americana_, as the fruit of his conscientious researches in American craniology. The authors of _Indigenous Races of the Earth_ and _Types of Mankind_, no less unhesitatingly affirmed that “identical characters pervade all the American races, ancient and modern, over the whole continent.”[111] In this they were sustained by the high authority of Agassiz, who, after discussing in his _Provinces of the Animal World, and their relation to Types of Man_, the fauna peculiar to the American continent, and pointing out the much greater uniformity of its natural productions, when its twin continents are compared with those of the eastern hemisphere, thus summed up the result of his investigations: “With these facts before us, we may expect that there should be no great diversity among the tribes of man inhabiting this continent; and indeed the most extensive investigation of their peculiarities has led Dr. Morton to consider them as constituting but a single race, from the confines of the Esquimaux down to the southernmost extremity of the continent. But, at the same time, it should be remembered that, in accordance with the zoological character of the whole realm, this race is divided into an infinite number of small tribes, presenting more or less difference one from another.” It was natural and reasonable that the men of the sixteenth century should believe in Calibans, or Ewaipanoma, “the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” America was to them, in the most literal sense, another world; and it was easier for them to think of it as peopled with such monstrosities than with human beings like ourselves. But it is curious to note in this nineteenth century the lingering traces of the old sentiment; and to see men of science still finding it difficult to emancipate themselves from the idea that this continent is so essentially another world, that it is inconceivable to them that the races by which it is peopled should bear any affinity to themselves or to others of the Old World. American ethnologists long clung to the idea of an essentially distinct indigenous race; and Dr. Nott, Dr. Meigs, and other investigators