From The Edinburgh Review.

written by others. With infinite trouble

BANCROFT'S “NATIVE RACES OF NORTH he has brought the ore to the surface, and

AMERICA." *

piled it up in full faith that it will undergo eventually those processes by which the dross is purged away, and pass current as the bright metal of history. His aim is modest, and implies true nobility of mind.

THERE is no field of inquiry more fascinating to the student of human progress than that offered by the great continent of America, in which the native races, shut off from contact with the oldThe book is remarkable in many ways. world civilization for an untold number of Its author, a bookseller in San Francisco, centuries, have found room for develop- when he set himself to his work in 1859, ment in various directions. In it the the- found that the necessary books and manuories of civilization, as propounded by Mr. scripts existed in no library in the world, Buckle and others, may be brought to a and he therefore began with characteristic practical test, for it presents us with peoples energy to secure everything within his in each of the different stages which con- reach in America. He then spent two nect the rude savage with the culture of years in obtaining all available materials Mexico and Central America. Man may be in Europe, being singularly favored by studied as a hunter, fisherman, farmer, as fortune in his enterprise. On the disa rude and unlettered worshipper of fet-persal of the library of the unfortunate ishes, or as the possessor of an elaborate emperor Maximilian, he obtained three literature, burdened with as complex a thousand volumes; in 1869 his library had ritual as that of the Egyptians, and developed into sixteen thousand books, bound fast by strict rules and observances manuscripts, and pamphlets, irrespective

French, German, Spanish, Latin, and Mexican; and he soon discovered that the materials for history which he sought

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in every phase of social life. In that of maps and newspapers, in English, vast continent, at the time of the Spanish conquest, there was represented every phase of progress through which man in Europe has passed in emerging from a condition of the rudest savagery to the comparatively high culture exemplified in the bronze age of the Etruscans. The subject has excited the imagination of many writers, and many have been the speculations regarding the derivation of the native tribes and of the American civilizations, in which, for the most part, each writer has accommodated his facts to his prejudices. It has been reserved for Mr. Bancroft to collect together for the first time, in the five bulky volumes before us, the facts necessary for a preliminary inquiry into these questions. His work is a most laborious encyclopædia of all that is known up to to-day of the native races of the Pacific States, and it embraces all the inhabitants of the region to the west of the Mississippi from the Arctic Sea to the Isthmus of Panama. His aim, as he tells us in his preface, is not so much to write history as to provide materials out of which it may be eventually

were so copiously diluted with trash, that it would be impossible to follow his different subjects in the manner in which he proposed with but one lifetime to devote to the work." In this emergency he devised a system of indexing the facts in such a manner that all the authorities could be brought to bear on any given point. This was done by employing a large staff of assistants to read the books and write down references on little cards labelled according to the subject. When we visited him in San Francisco, in 1875, we saw the work in full operation, and were struck with astonishment at the "factcatalogue" of the library, which consisted of packs of cards, each under its own view of the whole subject with the necesheading, and each giving a bird's eye In this manner Mr. sary references. Bancroft has collected materials which would have taken one man, so he tells us, about sixty years to bring together, and these he has used in the books before us, which are remarkable not merely for the vast number of facts which are recorded, but for the singular manner in which they

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have been collected together by the in- history must be seized now, or it will be domitable perseverance of one man. From lost forever. "To us," says our author, his method of work it was impossible that dross should not be mingled with the ore, but this can easily be removed by the hot fire of criticism. Indeed, he purposely records not merely those facts which are indisputably true, but the larger class of facts which have not been proved to be untrue.

It is scarcely necessary for us to call attention to the opportuneness of this work. The red man is swiftly passing away before the face of the white, and every day destroys some trace of the former. The westward advance of the frontier of the Eastern States is estimated by Professor Wilson to average nine miles per annum; and the trapper and woodsman, the advance-guard of European civilization, are steadily marching onwards to the setting sun, followed closely by the ranchero and tiller of the soil. The Pacific coast affords another base for the approach of Europeans from the east. From "the Golden Gate " and other places which have sprung up as it were by magic, the banners of civilization have steadily passed forward to the east, until the lands of the red man, from the British possessions in latitude 40° down to the frontiers of Mexico, are to be found mainly between the Sierra Nevada and the Mississippi; beyond these boundaries, if he exist at all, it is as a servant, and even in this tract the lines of railway, which may aptly be termed the iron bonds of civilization, are | bases of attack. The vast mineral wealth of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and California offer irresistible allurements to the gold and silver miner; the buffalo- the great staff of life is rapidly perishing under the rifles of the trapper and English sportsmen, and consequently the red hunter, listless and incapable of adapting himself to the changing conditions of life, has the choice of dying of starvation, of living by plunder and being eventually shot down, or of submitting to the charity of the white man, exposed to the unutterable evils which flow from the contact of civilized with uncivilized peoples. Their

Prehistoric Man, ii. 302.

"the savage nations of America have neither past nor future, only a brief present, from which we may judge somewhat of their past" (ii. 81). The stone implements, tumuli, and rude rock-sculptures are rapidly becoming as non-historic as similar relics of barbarism in Europe, and in many regions the memory of the ancient inhabitants is preserved only in the names of the mountains and of the rivers. At this time, therefore, such a work as this, done by a man living in the great metropolis of the West, and personally conversant with many of the rude tribes about which he writes, is singularly opportune. Its subject-matter, indeed, is not accurately expressed in its title, for it embraces not merely the native races of the Pacific States, but also the Eskimos of the Arctic Sea, and the inhabitants of the British territories. It includes, as well, the history of Mexico and Central America.

The interest which Mr. Bancroft's book has for us does not lie so much with the rapidly vanishing savage tribes as with the evidence as to the origin of the American peoples, and of that extraordinary civilization which was crushed in Mexico, Central America, and Peru under the heel of the ignorant and bigoted Spaniard. discussing these points we shall use the materials collected together by Professor Wilson in his last edition of " Prehistoric Man;" an admirable work, in which the history of the American tribes and civilization lies hidden under a misleading title.

In

The first point which offers itself for examination is the vexed question of the origin of the American peoples:

The problem [writes Mr. Bancroft] of the origin of the American aborigines is, in my opinion, enveloped in as much obscurity now as it ever was; and when I consider the close proximity of the north-western and northeastern extremities of America to Asia and Europe; the unthought-of and fortuitous circumstances that may at any time have cast any people upon the American coasts; the mighty convulsions that may have changed the whole face of the earth during the uncounted years that man may have dwelt upon its surface;

ways, successively or possibly simulta- | Flatöe, and now preserved in the archives neously; the most obvious route being that by way of Behring's Straits; another is offered by the Japanese current; and lastly, the same kind of enterprise which led the Sandwich Islanders to find their way to Tahiti, would surely lead some of the bold sailors of the Pacific to the shores of the new world. The idea of any people whatever being autochthones, in our opinion must be given up, in the face of the continual migrations and drifting to and fro of peoples revealed by the modern school of ethnology. The Mongoloid origin of the American peoples is proved by an appeal solely to natural history, without reference to the relics of the civilization of Mexico and Central America, which we shall discuss in another place.

Man must have inhabited America for a very long period to allow of the observed diversities in language.

On any theory of human origin [writes Professor Wilson], the blended gradations of America's widely diversified indigenous races demand a lengthened period for their develop. ment; and equally, on any theory of the origin of languages, must time be prolonged to admit of the multiplication of mutually unintelligible dialects and tongues in the New World. It is estimated that there are nearly six hundred languages, and dialects matured into independent tongues, in Europe. The known origin and growth of some of these may supply a standard whereby to gauge the time indicated by such a multiplication of tongues. But the languages of the American continents have been estimated to exceed twelve hundred and sixty, including agglutinate languages of peculiarly elaborate structure, and inflectional forms of complex development. ("Prehistoric Man," vol. i., p. 12.)

To pass over the idle speculations of American colonies of Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Welsh- we think that our author might have omitted the book of Mormon from among his authorities the evidence that the Scandinavians found their way to the New World in pre-Columbian times seems to us conclusive. It has, however, been disputed by no less authorities than George Bancroft, the historian of American colonization, and Washington Irving, who have summarily disposed of their claims to the discovery of America, without any critical analysis of the historical value of the Icelandic Sagas, on which they are based. These Sagas are known as the Codex Flatoiensis, a manuscript dating from the close of the fourteenth century, supposed to have been lost for many years, eventually found in the library of the island of

of Copenhagen. The antiquity of this work has never been seriously disputed, and the story of the voyages of the Northmen to America is proved not to have been an interpolation in an old work, by the fact that they form the framework of the narrative, which would be utterly destroyed by their omission. They cannot therefore be viewed as post-Columbian interpolations into a record of pre-Columbian events. They are a plain, straightforward account of the doings of certain adventurers, who set forth, not for purposes of discovery, but for purposes of gain; and there is not the least intimation that the writers had any idea of the magnitude of the discoveries which they relate. Had these been mere echoes of the discoveries of Columbus, it seems to us impossible that the narrative would have been so artless and simple as we find it. Their style, we may add, is distinctly that of the heroic age of Scandinavian enterprise, such as the Heimskringla, or the Orkneyinga Saga. It would have been impossible for a writer of the sixteenth century to have imitated successfully the elder Sagas without being detected by his contemporaries, or betraying himself by the insertion of some detail belonging to his own time. We therefore believe that the Codex is genuine, and accept the narra tive to be as truly historic as the pages of Froissart, or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. We are quite aware that there is a prejudice against the historic value of these Sagas among some modern critics, the grounds for which we have never been able to discover. It is very generally urged against their credibility that the statements of the wintering in Greenland, and of the fruits of Vinland are not consistent with the present climate in those regions. To our mind they give the stamp of genuineness and antiquity to the narrative, because now we have evidence from other quarters that the climate of Greenland, and consequently that also of the adjoining coast of America, has become more severe than it was when the deserted Danish settlements were founded. A similar change has also taken place in the climate of Iceland. The story of the discovery of America by the Northmen is not generally known to English readers, and we will therefore give it in some little detail.

Eric the Red emigrated from Iceland to Greenland in the spring of 986, along with Heriulf Bardson. In the autumn Biarne, a son of the latter, set sail from Iceland to