The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892)

I read the Internet Archive scan of Sir Daniel Wilson, The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies. The title page gives New York, Macmillan and Co., 1892, and names him LL.D., F.R.S.E., President of the University of Toronto, author of The Prehistoric Annals of Scotland and Prehistoric Man: The Origin of Civilisation. A leaf before the title says the book was printed by R. & R. Clark for David Douglas, Edinburgh. The same printer’s line is repeated after the index. The year on the title page is 1892, so I treat the book as public domain and quote consecutive sentences.

The scan has 430 file pages. The title page, the printer’s leaf, and the contents leaf have no printed numbers. The preface is numbered v and vi. The studies are numbered in Arabic. Printed page 1 of the text is file page 13, and through the rest of the book printed page N is file page N plus 12. The opening page of the Atlantis study prints no numeral. The next page is numbered 2, and the contents gives the study as page 1, so I cite that opening as p. 1. The index runs from printed page 403 to 411, and the copy then prints THE END.

I am setting his reading of the Timaeus and Critias, his answer to Brasseur, and his answer to Donnelly’s Atlantis, the Antediluvian World beside the other notices on this site. I am not putting Donnelly’s own case into Wilson’s mouth. The later studies are ethnographic papers. I say what each one is, and I pull only the Atlantis, flood, or origin claim that is actually in it.

The book at a glance

• Title: The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies.
• Author: Sir Daniel Wilson, LL.D., F.R.S.E., President of the University of Toronto. The preface is by his daughter, Sybil Wilson, signed at Bencosie, Toronto, August 1892. He died while the proofs were still in his hands. He had called it his last book, and he asked Mr. Douglas to correct the proofs and to make an index.
• Edition I read: New York, Macmillan and Co., 1892. Printed by R. & R. Clark for David Douglas, Edinburgh. All rights reserved.
• Length: Eight studies. The Lost Atlantis, pp. 1 to 36. The Vinland of the Northmen, pp. 37 to 80. Trade and Commerce in the Stone Age, pp. 81 to 129. Pre-Aryan American Man, pp. 130 to 184. The Aesthetic Faculty in Aboriginal Races, pp. 185 to 245. The Huron-Iroquois, a Typical Race, pp. 246 to 306. Hybridity and Heredity, pp. 307 to 338. Relative Racial Brain-Weight and Size, pp. 339 to 402. Index, pp. 403 to 411.
• What he claims: Plato’s Atlantis is one of the vaguest popular legends, and Jowett is right that the Critias runs out into details with no historical value. Wilson still thinks the original story may mix the fall of some Iberian or other western Mediterranean power with a vague tradition of a continent beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Geology, as he reads Wyville Thomson and Lyell, gives no engulfed Atlantic continent, and the Canaries, Madeiras, and Azores are not fragments of one. He names Donnelly’s book as the latest popular form of that engulfed-continent case, and he says it ignores the science. Real pre-Columbian contact, for him, is the Northmen in Greenland and on the mainland before the close of the tenth century. America was peopled by repeated migrations. He prefers an early wave through the Pacific islands into South America, a later Atlantic wave by the Canaries, Madeiras, and Azores toward the Antilles and Central America, and a latest entry by Behring Strait. Language, as far as it goes, favors the Pacific over the Mediterranean route implied by Atlantis. Central American civilization, especially Maya, may be a native growth. Until a genuine Old World inscription turns up there, the legendary Atlantis remains a myth, and pre-Columbian America keeps the credit for its own progress.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• The tale, as he takes it from Plato. An island-continent over against the Pillars of Hercules, greater than Libya and Asia together, a highway to other islands and to an ocean of which the Mediterranean was a harbor. Solon heard it at Sais from the priests of Neith, or Athene. The chain runs Solon, Dropidas, his son, then the boy Critias. The priests put the primitive Athenians 9000 years before Solon, and Wilson calls the story already “white with age” in the time of Socrates, 3400 years ago. Athens, a warrior caste, beat the invader and then perished in the same convulsion that swallowed the island (pp. 1 to 4).
• What he will salvage. Not the Critias details. A possible historic basis: the fall of an Iberian or other aggressive power in the western Mediterranean, mingled with vague traditions of intercourse with a vast continent beyond the Pillars. Hyde Clarke’s idea that Atlantis was the king’s name rather than the dominion does not move him. King and kingdom have always shared a name (pp. 2, 4).
• What he will not salvage. Crates of Pergamos on the Four Worlds, Agu of Babylonia as “King of the Four Races,” and the Inca Tavintinsuzu, the Empire of the Four Quarters. Regal titles are too cheap. Abraham and 318 servants beat Chederlaomer and Tidal, “King of Nations.” Dunbar, twenty years after Columbus, still knew America only as “the new-found isle” (pp. 4, 5).
• Geology. Wyville Thomson, Depths of the Sea: the Atlantic basin is at least as old as the later Secondary, and dredging shows unbroken life on the sea-bed from the Cretaceous to now. Lyell: the Canaries, Madeiras, and Azores are not surviving fragments of a submerged island or of the adjacent continent. Volcanic traces there are local upheaval, not the sinking of continental areas. America and the basin are both too old to be brought into human history (pp. 5, 6).
• Brasseur and Donnelly. Brasseur’s Histoire des Nations Civilisées argued a self-originated American civilization from native myths. His later Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique took Atlantis literally and stretched America east to the Canaries. Wilson calls that unworthy of serious consideration. Bancroft’s Native Races of the Pacific States points to forty-two works on Atlantis. The latest popular advocacy of a real mid-Atlantic island-continent, literally engulfed inside historical tradition, is Donnelly’s book. Wilson says Donnelly, like Brasseur, ignores the opinion that the main features of the Atlantic basin have not changed in any recent geological period (pp. 5, 6).
• The contact he does accept. Copenhagen’s Antiquitates Americanae and Grönland’s Historiske Mindesmærker, with genuine runic inscriptions, put the Northmen in Greenland and on the mainland of North America before the close of the tenth century. That is history. A sunken continent is not. The wider question he sets himself is whether older intercourse is more probable than the engulfed continent (p. 7).
• Phoenician range, not a bridge of land. Tyre and Sidon already named in Joshua. Strabo gives Phoenician factories beyond the Pillars just after the Trojan war. Tin from northwest Spain and Cornwall, and amber, also moved overland. Pharaoh Necho, 611 to 605 B.C., sent a Phoenician voyage that circumnavigated Africa by the Red Sea. Hanno’s Periplus, the original lost, founded Liby-Phoenician cities beyond the Pillars and has been credited with a route later sailed by Vasco da Gama in 1497. Aristotle’s “Antilla,” and Diodorus on a secret Carthaginian island, he is willing to place in the Azores, 800 miles (1287 kilometers) from Portugal, because Carthaginian coins were found at Corvo. He asks what impediment existed in 1400 B.C. that did not still exist in 1400 A.D. (pp. 8 to 12).
• Central America, not Mexico or Peru, as the high seat. Maya cities in Yucatan and Guatemala, hieroglyphs, and a system of dates. After the conquest they used the Roman alphabet. The Annals of the Cakchiquels, edited by Brinton, and the Titre Généalogique des Seigneurs de Totonicapan, translated by de Charencey, both remember a migration from Tula, a mythical land across the water. Aztec Quetzalcoatl, fair, long dark hair, flowing beard, taught agriculture, metallurgy, and government, then sailed for Tlapallan. Cortes was taken for his return (pp. 13, 14).
• Race and language. The American Indian is a Mongol. No American language he has seen shows immigration inside the earliest authentic history, which fits a legend already old in Solon’s day. The Basque resemblance, Whitney’s “stepping-stone,” has proved illusory beyond general structure. If the American Mongol had come from Asia inside Phoenician times, the vocabularies should show a much clearer common genealogy. They do not (pp. 15 to 19).
• His three routes. Earliest, from a supposed Asiatic cradle through the Pacific islands into South America, before the northern steppes of Asia were full. Next, an Atlantic wave by the Canaries, Madeiras, and Azores to the Antilles and Central America, and probably by the Cape Verdes, or the southern equatorial current, to Brazil. Latest, Behring Strait and the North Pacific islands, which he uses to account for differences in the north, including the conquerors of the Mexican plateau. He sets aside palaeocosmic man. If Atlantis holds any historical trace at all, it is modern beside the men of the European drift and of the Delaware and California gravels (pp. 20, 21).
• Why he trusts the Pacific more than Atlantis. Present ethnology makes the Behring route look like an overflow of Arctic American population into Asia, not the other way. Gallatin’s Polynesian and American verb-forms, the inclusive and exclusive “we” in Maori and Ojibway, Hale’s shell-disk currency from the Loo-Choo Islands to California and on to Long Island wampum, Easter Island statues beside Peruvian megaliths, and artificial skull-flattening from the Euxine Macrocephali through the Pacific to the Flatheads and Peru, are his trail. He will not vouch for the Chinese date of Fuh-he, about 2950 B.C. (pp. 22 to 24).
• Hyde Clarke’s clock is too fast. Four thousand years since a Sumerian settlement in Babylonia and India, Peru reached 4000 to 5000 years ago, or even within the last 3000. Wilson says a date that recent fits neither the faint linguistic traces nor a lost Atlantis of the elder world. Akkad, an Agaw or Nile-region trace in Guarani and Omagua, a Sumerian wave that he reports as establishing Aymara rule in Peru and a Maya element in Yucatan, and a later Siamese link with Quichua and Aztec, are still, for him, materials, not a history (pp. 26, 27).
• The one truth he leaves the legend. It puts Mediterranean knowledge of a world beyond the Atlantic back into an age already hoary in the time of Socrates, or even of Solon. Proof, if it ever comes, has to be an inscription of the kind that still survives from Egypt, Assyria, the Hittites, Phoenicia, and the Northmen. North of the Gulf of Mexico he thinks none will be found. Maya writing is still unread, so a native growth and an Old World germ are both still open there. Mexican civilization is a borrowed reflex of Central America. The Aztec cycle was fifty-two years, not the Egyptian Sothic cycle of 1460. Humboldt’s reputed Phoenician scrap from a cavern between the Orinoco and the Amazon, copied by the Franciscan Ranson Bueno, is not that proof (pp. 29 to 35).
• Where he stops. The lost Atlantis “lies still in the future.” Letters can be followed from quipu and wampum to the hieroglyphs of Copan and Palenque. Gold was the first metal, then native copper. He would not be surprised by a real Phoenician inscription, or by Assyrian gryphons or Tyrian shekels, in the buried empire of Montezuma or the ruins of Central America. Until that stone or that hoard appears, the legend remains a myth, and pre-Columbian America is credited with a progress of its own (pp. 35, 36).

Preface

Sybil Wilson writes because her father asked her to. She will not define the aim of the book. In his notebook she finds it described as a few carefully studied monographs, linked by a slender thread of ethnographic relationship. He came back from Montreal in June already ill, found the proofs, and corrected them until he could not hold the pen. One of his last requests was that Mr. Douglas correct the proofs himself and be sure to make an index. She signs from Bencosie, Toronto, in August 1892, and commits the volume to readers of ethnology. The preface adds no Atlantis, flood, or origin claim of its own. It only says whose last words these studies are.

The Lost Atlantis

The study fills printed pages 1 to 36. Its only printed subsection is “Early ideas,” at the start. After that the argument runs on without a fresh heading. I break it below by subject.

Early ideas

He opens on the legend itself, and on the Columbus anniversary that was about to be kept while the book was in the press.

The legend of Atlantis, an island-continent lying in the Atlantic Ocean over against the Pillars of Hercules, which, after being long the seat of a powerful empire, was engulfed in the sea, has been made the basis of many extravagant speculations; and anew awakens keenest interest with the revolving centuries.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 1

The 12th of October 1892 has been proclaimed a World's holiday, to celebrate its accomplished cycle of four centuries since Columbus set foot on the shores of the West.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 1

The story, he says, is in the Timaeus and, with many fanciful amplifications, in the Critias. Critias repeats to Socrates a story his grandfather, then ninety, told him when he was not more than ten. Solon had visited Sais, at the head of the Egyptian delta, and there learned from the priests of the ancient empire of Atlantis and of its overthrow by a convulsion of nature. Jowett, in the critical edition of the dialogues, is his first authority for throwing the tale out as history.

"The world, like a child, has readily, and for the most part, unhesitatingly accepted the tale of the Island of Atlantis."

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 2

Wilson agrees that the Critias expands the legend into details of no possible historical significance or genuine antiquity. He does not stop there. Men like Humboldt have seen in the original legend the possible vestige of a widely spread tradition of the earliest times, and that is the respect in which he means to review it.

Even in the time of Socrates, and of the elder Critias, Atlantis was already a vague and inconsistent tradition of a remote past, though not more inconsistent than much else the Greeks received. Hyde Clarke, in an “Examination of the Legend” in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, concludes that Atlantis was the name of the king rather than of the dominion. Wilson answers that king and kingdom have always been liable to share a designation.

According to the account in the Timaeus, Atlantis was a continent lying over against the Pillars of Hercules, greater in extent than Libya and Asia combined; the highway to other islands and to a great ocean, of which the Mediterranean Sea was a mere harbour.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 2

In the vague geography of Socrates and Plato, that Atlantic domain is confused with some Iberian or western African power arrayed against Egypt, Hellas, and the countries on the Mediterranean. The western Mediterranean itself was poorly known. Homer put the Elysian plain on the far horizon. Hesiod put departed heroes in the Happy Isles beyond the western waters. Seneca foretold that the mysterious ocean would yet disclose a world it then kept concealed. Greek Hesperia kept receding west as knowledge grew.

The elder Critias derived the legend from a poetic chronicle of Solon, whom he called one of the best of poets as well as the wisest of men. Plato puts the elements of the oral tradition into the mouth of Timaeus of Locris, a Pythagorean. Solon told his friend Dropidas, great-grandfather of Critias. Dropidas told his son. That son, eighty years later, in extreme old age, told his grandson, a boy of ten. Those are only the later links. Solon himself, at Sais, under Neith or Athene, was told how ignorant the Hellenes were.

"O Solon, Solon," said an aged priest to him, "you Hellenes are ever young, and there is no old man who is a Hellene; there is no opinion or tradition of knowledge among you which is white with age."

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 3

Solon had told the mythical tales of Phoroneus and Niobe, and of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and had tried to reckon the generations since the great deluge. The priest of Sais called such Hellenic annals children’s stories. Memory went back only a little way, and recalled only the latest of the great convulsions, because there was no written voice among the Greeks.

And so the venerable priest undertook to tell him of the social life and condition of the primitive Athenians 9000 years before.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 3

It is among the events of this older era that the overthrow of Atlantis is told: a story already "white with age" in the time of Socrates, 3400 years ago.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 3

The warriors of Athens in that elder time were a distinct caste. When the power of Atlantis was marshalled against the Mediterranean nations, Athens repelled the invader and gave liberty to the nations that had been in danger. In the convulsion that followed, the island-continent was engulfed, and the warrior race of Athens perished with it.

He calls the story, as it reaches us, one of the vaguest of popular legends, transmitted in the most obscure of Plato’s writings. Then he states the only historic basis he is willing to allow.

Nevertheless, there is nothing improbable in the idea that it rests on some historic basis, in which the tradition of the fall of an Iberian, or other aggressive power in the western Mediterranean, is mingled with other and equally vague traditions of intercourse with a vast continent lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 4

Hyde Clarke’s Khita and Khita-Peruvian Epoch is the next temptation, and he refuses it. Clarke points to an ancient geography of the Four Worlds, alluded to by early writers and notably by Crates of Pergamos in 160 B.C. He connects that with George Smith’s reading of Agu, an ancient king of Babylonia, who called himself “King of the Four Races,” and with the Inca Tavintinsuzu, the Empire of the Four Quarters of the World. Wilson says the extravagance of regal titles has been the same in widely diverse ages. Four kings made war against five in the vale of Siddim. When Lot was taken by Chederlaomer, king of Elam, Tidal, “King of Nations,” and their allies, Abraham with 318 trained servants born in his house smote them and recovered the captives. “The King of Nations” was somewhat on a par with one of the six vassal kings who rowed King Edgar on the River Dee. He will not deduce, from such premises, an age of accurate geography in which the western hemisphere was known as one of four worlds. When Dunbar wrote of America, twenty years after Columbus, he knew it only as “the new-found isle.”

A continent the geologists will not sink

The old opinion that convulsions of nature revolutionised nations, and that empires were destroyed by fire or engulfed in the ocean, revived with the cataclysmic speculations of early modern geology, and it still has advocates who have given little heed to later authorities. Among the most zealous was the late Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg. Wilson gives him a real merit. He was the first to draw the learned world to the native transcripts of Maya records, and his place in American archaeology is somewhat like that of Boucher de Perthes in the palaeontology of Europe. Histoire des Nations Civilisées aims at a self-originated civilization, demonstrated from religious myths and historical traditions. In the later Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique the Abbé took the legend literally and called up, “from the vasty deep,” a submerged continent, or rather an eastward extension of America, including, as he thought probable, the Canaries and other insular survivals of an imaginary Atlantis.

Such speculations of unregulated zeal are unworthy of serious consideration.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 5

He is not surprised that the Timaeus kindled theorists whom no scientific doubt restrains. Geology, as he reads it, lends no confirmation. Professor Wyville Thomson, in Depths of the Sea, has shown that oscillations of the land have modified the boundaries of the Atlantic, while the geological age of its basin dates at least as far back as the later Secondary. The animal life from the dredge confirms that.

The study of its animal life, as revealed in dredging, strongly confirms this, disclosing an unbroken continuity of life on the Atlantic sea-bed from the Cretaceous period to the present time; and, as Sir Charles Lyell has pointed out, in his Principles of Geology, the entire evidence is adverse to the idea that the Canaries, the Madeiras, and the Azores, are surviving fragments of a vast submerged island, or continuous area of the adjacent continent.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 6

There are indications of volcanic action. They show local upheaval, not the submergence of extensive continental areas. He compares the continent-builders to the man who evolves a camel out of his own inner consciousness. Lost Atlantis will always tempt them. Mr. H. H. Bancroft, in Native Races of the Pacific States, refers to forty-two different works for notices and speculations concerning Atlantis. Then he names the book he treats as the current popular case. I give his sentence only. I do not import the claims of that book.

The latest advocacy of the idea of an actual island-continent of the mid-Atlantic, literally engulfed in the ocean, within a period authentically embraced by historical tradition, is to be found in its most popular form in Mr. Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis, the Antediluvian World.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 6

By him, as by Abbé Brasseur, the concurrent opinions of the highest authorities in science, that the main features of the Atlantic basin have undergone no change within any recent geological period, are wholly ignored.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 6

To anyone who attaches value to scientific evidence, such speculations present no serious claims. He notes a different patriotic fancy, that America is the older continent in a geological sense. He accepts something narrower. That continent, and the Atlantic basin between it and Europe, are both of an antiquity that places the age of either entirely apart from speculations that touch human history.

The fancy he does not need is the sunken land. Intercourse between the Old World and the New, before the fifteenth century, has already passed from speculation to historical fact.

The idea of intercourse between the Old and the New World prior to the fifteenth century, passed from the region of speculation to the domain of historical fact, when the publication of the Antiquitates Americanae and the Grönland's Historiske Mindesmærker, by the antiquaries of Copenhagen, adduced contemporary authorities, and indisputably genuine runic inscriptions, in proof of the visits of the Northmen to Greenland and the mainland of North America, before the close of the tenth century.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 6

What we have anew to consider is: whether, in its wider aspect, it is more consistent with probability than the revived notion of a continent engulfed in the Atlantic Ocean?

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 7

Ships that did not need a sunken bridge

The earliest students of American antiquities turned to Phoenicia, Egypt, or other old centres for Mexican, Peruvian, and Central American art and letters. So long as the unity of the human race was unquestioned, some common source was inevitable.

The idea, therefore, that the new world which Columbus revealed, was none other than the long-lost Atlantis, is one that has probably suggested itself independently to many minds.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 7

References have likewise been sought in Herodotus, Seneca, Pliny, and others, for islands or continents beyond the western verge. Any such allusion would have come down by oral transmission, while knowledge of the eastern hemisphere itself was limited. The Cassiterides, from which tin was brought, and which he takes as the British Isles, were known to Herodotus only as uncertainly located Atlantic islands of which he had no direct information. Assuryuchurabal, founder of the palace at Nimrud, took from the people on the Orontes, from the confines of Hamath to the sea, spoils that included one hundred talents of anna, or tin. The same metal is named again in cuneiform inscriptions. The tin traders, supposed to be the Shirutana, were the merchants of the world before Tyre took the lead. Already in the time of Joshua, Tyre is “the strong city,” and “Great Zidon” is named with her when the bounds of Asher are set to the sea coast. Homer celebrates Sidonian art. Greek Seleucia, or Cilicia, was an attempted restoration of the old Shirutana seaport, perhaps an emporium of Khita merchandise, and certainly a shipping place for Phoenicians in the overland trade from the Euphrates. One favored etymology of Britain, as the tin islands, is barat-anna, with the Cassiterides as the later Aryan equivalent, Greek kassiteros, Sanskrit kastira.

In those centuries, voyages were made far into the Atlantic. The Phoenicians, though settled among the nations farthest from the outer ocean, habitually traded with Atlantic settlements. They colonised the western Mediterranean, held posts on the Euxine and in Sicily and the larger islands, and passed the straits to the coasts of Europe and Africa. Strabo (i. 48) gives them factories beyond the Pillars of Hercules in the period just after the Trojan war, an era he says grows less mythical, and to which the commercial prosperity of Tyre may be assigned. Tarshish was for Phoenicia what the East has been to England. Tartessus, later the Guadalquivir, opened a mining district and fisheries of tunny and murena. With the Guadiana, traders went far inland. Colonies at the river mouths were fresh starting points up the Atlantic seaboard. At least much of the tin came from northwest Spain and from Cornwall, though tin of the Cassiterides and Baltic amber also went overland to the Adriatic and the mouth of the Rhone.

A Phoenician expedition in the reign of Pharaoh Necho, 611 to 605 B.C., after that maritime power had declined, circumnavigated Africa by way of the Red Sea. Hanno, a Carthaginian, guided the Punic fleet round the parts of Libya that border the Atlantic, and has been credited with reaching the Indian Ocean by the route Vasco da Gama sailed in 1497. The object stated in the Periplus was to found Liby-Phoenician cities beyond the Pillars. How far south he went is disputed, because the original work is lost. Wilson thinks it enough that Hanno pursued the route which in a later century led to the discovery of Brazil. Aristotle applies the name “Antilla” to a Carthaginian discovery. Diodorus Siculus assigns the Carthaginians knowledge of an island in the ocean whose secret they kept, a refuge if they ever had to leave Africa. He thinks it far from improbable that this is one of the Azores, 800 miles (1287 kilometers) from Portugal. Greek and Roman writers make no other reference to them, but Carthaginian coins at Corvo, the extreme northwesterly island, leave little room to doubt that Punic voyagers were there. He identifies that island with Aristotle’s Antilla. After the Carthaginian oligarchy, naval adventure was still encouraged, but the maritime era of the Mediterranean belongs to more ancient centuries. The Greeks were inferior in enterprise to the Phoenicians. The Romans were essentially unmaritime. The revival with Venice and Genoa came from fresh blood, the sea-kings of the Baltic.

Mediterranean history, for us, is the history of civilization around that sea. Recent disclosures have recovered the Khita, or Hittites, as a power centred between the Euphrates and the Orontes, extending into Asia Minor, and about 1200 B.C. reaching west to the Aegean. They had been known only as one Canaanitish tribe, supposed to have been displaced by the Hebrew inheritors of Palestine. Professor Curtius is his witness that one path of Babylonian and Assyrian art into Greece ran across Asia Minor, the road a projected Euphrates railway would revive. Compared with Egypt and the earliest nations of eastern Asia, the Greeks were children. The ancients assigned the origin of navigation to the Phoenicians. Later Greeks owned themselves pupils in seamanship and called the pole-star the Phoenician star. Ezekiel’s picture of Tyre, merchant of many isles, with Zidon and Arvad as mariners and Tyre’s wise men as pilots, was spoken at the close of Phoenician history. The circumnavigation of Africa, counted in the fifteenth century a match for Columbus, had long before been done by Phoenician mariners. Carthage inherited the enterprise and never equalled it. With the fall of Carthage the Mediterranean became a Roman lake. He quotes the blundering voyage of St. Paul. To such a people, memories of Punic exploration, Phoenician enterprise, or vague legends of an Atlantis beyond the ocean were equally useless. The narrow sea between Gaul and Britain was barrier enough.

Seeing that the oldest traditions assign navigation to that people, he asks what impediment in 1400 B.C., or any earlier century, did not still exist in 1400 A.D. America was no farther from Tarshish in the golden age of Tyre than in the age of Henry the Navigator. With the sagas of the sea-rovers who took Normandy and spoiled the Angles and Saxons, there is evidence enough that after Iceland and Greenland they made their way south to Labrador and some way along the American coast. How far south, once assigned to Rhode Island, is still controversial. He reviews it in the next study, and says the settlement of that question does not affect this one. About A.D. 1000, when St. Olaf was introducing Christianity into Norway, Leif, son of Eric, founder of the first Greenland colony, sailed from Ericsfiord or another Greenland port and landed on more than one point of the North American coast. The ships were mere galleys, not larger than a good fishing smack, inferior to it in deck and rigging. For compass they had only the old Phoenician star. The track from Norway to Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador was beset by fogs. They needed a compass more than the sailors of the Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Nina, who left Palos for Guanahani. The Santa Maria, the only decked vessel, was stranded. The Pinta and the Nina, with crews of thirty and twenty-four, had only lateen sails. Eight years later the Portuguese admiral Pedro Alvares de Cabral, following Vasco da Gama’s route, was carried by the equatorial current to 10 degrees south and discovered Brazil in spite of the compass. That was A.D. 1500, under King Manoel. The same mischance might have befallen the Phoenician admiral of Necho in 600 B.C., or Hanno, or other early navigators on the Atlantic. On the news, the king sent Amerigo Vespucci, who mapped the coast of South America and, Wilson says, wrested from Columbus the honor of giving his name to the continent.

What the New World itself remembers

Turning from Old World myths to New, he finds traces that seem interpretable as an American counterpart of the Atlantis legend. The chief seat of the highest native American civilization is neither Mexico nor Peru, but Central America. The Maya stock of Yucatan, Guatemala, and the neighboring region were peculiarly well placed, and they appear to have achieved the greatest progress there. He compares them with the dwellers in the Euphrates valley, whose buried cities are now yielding ages that had passed into oblivion before the Father of History wrote. Tested by intervening centuries, the Maya monuments are not so venerable, but for America’s chroniclings they are more prehistoric than the Assyrian mounds. The cities were large and populous, and the ruins are still magnificent. The Mayas were a lettered people. Like the Egyptians they recorded history and creed in sculptured hieroglyphs, and they wrote and ciphered. He does not doubt that their system of computing time and recording dates will be mastered.

Soon after the Spanish conquest the Mayas adopted the Roman alphabet, for their own traditions and myths and for some of the ancient national documents. Those versions survive. The most recent contribution he names is The Annals of the Cakchiquels, by Dr. D. G. Brinton, a translation of a native legal document, or titulo, in which soon after the conquest the heir of an ancient Maya family set out his claim. With it he sets the Titre Généalogique des Seigneurs de Totonicapan, translated from the Spanish by M. de Charencey. Both illustrate the same event. A Cakchiquel prince tells of the overthrow of the Quiche power. A Quiche seignior, one of the lords of Totonicapan, describes it from his side. Both were Maya, in what is now Guatemala. Each nation had a capital of temples and palaces whose splendor surprised the Spaniards. Both preserved traditions of a migration from Tula, a mythical land from which their ancestors came across the water.

Such traditions meet him on many sides. Captain Cook found in Tahiti a vague legend of a ship that came out of the ocean, which Wilson takes as a dim record of ancestral intercourse with an outer world. The Aztecs had the golden age of Anahuac, and Quetzalcoatl, instructor in agriculture, metallurgy, and the arts of government. He was of fair complexion, with long dark hair and a flowing beard, characteristics foreign to their race. When his mission was done he set sail for the mysterious shores of Tlapallan. At the appearance of the ships of Cortes, the Spaniards were believed to have returned with that divine instructor, from the source of the rising sun.

Mongol, Basque, and three ways in

What tradition hints, physiology confirms, he says. The races of America differ less in physical character from those of Asia than the races of Africa or of Europe do.

The American Indian is a Mongol; and though marked diversities are traceable throughout the American continent, the range of variation is much less than in the eastern hemisphere.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 15

The western continent appears to have been peopled by repeated migrations and by diverse routes. When he tries to date the primeval settlement, evidence wholly fails. Language is elsewhere a safe guide. It has tied the Aryans of India and Persia to those of Europe, the Finn and Lapp to Asiatic forefathers, the Basques as an independent stock older than the oldest Aryan intruders, and the branches of the Semitic family. He asks whether it can tell of American affinities, for civilised Mayas and Peruvians or for the forest and prairie races of the north.

He warns, from the millions in America who are of African blood and yet speak Aryan languages, that linguistic and ethnical classifications are not the same thing. Even so, philology cannot be slighted. The American languages give one answer that accords with the legend, “white with age,” of an island-continent in the Atlantic with which the Mediterranean nations once held intercourse.

None of them indicates any trace of immigration within the period of earliest authentic history.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 15

Readers who take the Timaeus references to political relations common to Atlantis and parts of Libya and Europe, or who favor early intercourse between the Mediterranean and the western continent, have naturally turned to the Eskuara of the Basques. He recognizes it as the surviving representative of languages spoken by the Allophylian peoples of Europe before the Aryan intrusion. Its grammar differs widely from Semitic or Indo-European speech and sits in the same class with Mongol, East African, and American languages. Professor Whitney, in Life and Growth of Languages, calls Basque a suitable stepping-stone into the linguistic domain of the New World, because no other Old World dialect so much resembles American languages in structure. Wilson says this glimpse has proved illusory. Beyond the general structure there is no affinity, in vocabulary or grammar, such as direct affiliation would show. Nothing in the resemblance is incompatible with a stepping-stone from Asia to America by the Pacific islands. The languages that matter most, those of Central America, are only now receiving adequate attention. Startling evidence may yet appear. So far, no American language discloses a relationship of the kind that let Dr. Pritchard put the people the Greeks called Keltai into the Aryan stock, against earlier ethnologists who had taken them for precursors of the Aryans.

Physiology, he says, lends no confirmation to an indigenous American race, specially adapted to its environment, with languages that are ramifications of a single native stem. So far as physical affinities can be relied on, the man of America, in his most characteristic diversities, is of Asiatic origin. Observers who differ everywhere else have classed him with the Asiatic Mongol: the Mongolian of Pickering, the American Mongolidae of Latham, the Mongoloid of Huxley. Professor Flower, addressing the Anthropological Institute in 1885, classes the Eskimo as the typical North Asiatic Mongol. In other American races he notes the nasal bones, the superciliary ridge, and the retreating forehead, and still includes them all in the Mongolian type.

If that American Mongol came from Asia, or from the common stock of which the Asiatic Mongol is the type, inside any period that even the earliest Phoenician history would embrace, much clearer traces should appear in language than a shared habit of agglutination. He looks in vain for a common genealogy of the Semitic and Aryan kind. North of the Gulf of Mexico the art of the metallurgist remained unknown to the last. In Mexico it appears as a gift of recent origin, derived from Central America. An Asiatic origin for the art of Tubal-cain has been pretty generally assumed for Central and South America, but only by inference. That inference is carried back to a mythic Quetzalcoatl, for neither the metallurgist nor his art was introduced in recent centuries. Assume, for argument, a common population of Asia and America already familiar with metals, architecture, and sculpture, at a date coeval with the founding of Tyre, “the daughter of Sidon.” Language does not help the postulate.

He lists the great groups. Huron-Iroquois, of old from the St. Lawrence to North Carolina. Algonkin, from Hudson Bay to South Carolina. Dakotan, from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. Athabascan, from the Eskimo frontier inside the Arctic circle to New Mexico. Tinne, west of the Rockies, from the Yukon and the Mackenzie far south on the Pacific slope. Elaborate comparisons with Asiatic vocabularies remain vague. Curious points of agreement invite more research. The evidence of relationship still rests mainly on structure. Agglutinative suffixes are common to Eskimo and many American Indian tongues. Dr. H. Rink describes the Eskimo polysynthetic process. Flower, who calls the Eskimo typical North Asiatic Mongols, also speaks of them as almost as perfectly isolated in their Arctic home “as an island population.” The same structure is common to their language and to the great North American families, an exaggerated form of the Ural-Altaic or Turanian group. Race-type corresponds between the Old World and the New. Vocabularies do not.

Max Muller has noticed the tendency of American languages toward an endless multiplication of dialects. Hervas grouped them into eleven families, seven for the northern continent and four for South America. Wilson says the work is only beginning. M. Lucien Adam, in two papers for the Congres International des Americanistes, examined sixteen languages of North and South America and concluded that they belong to independent families, as essentially distinct as if there had primitively been several human pairs. Dr. Brinton, in the American Antiquarian for January 1886, commends Nahuatl, popularly Aztec. It is one of the most completely organized Indian languages, it has a literature, and it is still used by upwards of half a million people. From that area southward through Central America, and in the seat of South American civilization, is where Wilson hopes for direct evidence of ancient intercourse. Brinton’s later Notes on the Mangue, an extinct language of Nicaragua, withdraw an earlier guess of a connection with the Aymara of Peru. That sustains the prevailing opinion that there is no direct affiliation between the languages of North and South America.

All this suggests either Agassiz’s natural provinces, in which the diverse varieties of American man originated in various centres and spread over the continent, or immigration from different foreign centres. Wilson accepts the latter as the more tenable, and says he long ago sketched a scheme that seemed to fit the imperfect evidence.

This assumed the earliest current of population, in its progress from a supposed Asiatic cradle-land, to have spread through the islands of the Pacific, and reached the South American continent before any excess of population had diffused itself into the inhospitable northern steppes of Asia.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 20

By an Atlantic oceanic migration, another wave of population occupied the Canaries, Madeiras, and the Azores, and so passed to the Antilles, Central America, and probably by the Cape Verdes, or, guided by the more southern equatorial current, to Brazil.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 20

Latest of all, Behring Strait and the North Pacific islands may have become the highway for a migration by which certain striking diversities in the northern continent, including the conquerors of the Mexican plateau, are most easily accounted for.

He does not think the question requires him to decide whether man in America was contemporary with the great extinct animals of the Quaternary. The affinities, and the remoteness of any assignable migration from Asia, make it far from improbable that the latest oscillations of land had an influence. The soundings of Behring Strait, and of the sea-bed south to the Aleutian Islands, accord with a former continuity of land between Asia and America. Darwin’s observations on the Beagle suggested a continuous subsidence of the Pacific, which would have left more islands for a crossing. The Challenger expedition fails to confirm the old theory of the origin of the coral islands. In any view, the history of existing races, in Europe and in America, has to be studied apart from palaeocosmic man.

If the vague legend of the lost Atlantis embodies any trace of remotest historical tradition, it belongs to a modern era compared with the men either of the European drift, or of the post-glacial deposits of the Delaware and the auriferous gravels of California.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 21

Comparative philology, he says, must deal with an era more recent than the contemporaries of the mastodon and of Europe’s mammoth and reindeer periods, even though modern representatives of the reindeer have been sought inside the American Arctic circle.

Pacific traces he thinks stronger than Atlantis

Such evidence as a comparison of languages thus far supplies, lends more countenance to the idea of migration through the islands of the Pacific, than to such a route from the Mediterranean as is implied in any significance attached to the legend of Atlantis.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 21

As to Behring Strait, present ethnology and philology point rather to an overflow of Arctic American population into Asia. Gallatin first drew attention to analogies in the structure of Polynesian and American languages: tense, mood, and voice by affixed particles, and place valued over time in a predominant locative verb. Those are to be looked for with greater probability in South America. The substitution of affixed particles for inflections, especially for the direction of action relative to the speaker, is common to Polynesian and Oregon languages, and has analogies in Cherokee. The inclusive and exclusive “we,” “you and I” against “they and I,” is as characteristic of Maori as of Ojibway. Later observations have further encouraged common elements, and so a migration by the Pacific.

A curious confirmation, he says, comes from money. Horatio Hale’s paper “The Origin of Primitive Money,” read at the British Association in Montreal in 1884 and printed in the Popular Science Monthly, argues that the most ancient currency in China consisted of disks and slips of tortoise shell. The fact is stated in the encyclopaedia of the Emperor Kang-he, who reigned in the early eighteenth century, and the Chinese annalists assert that metal coins have been in use from the time of Fuh-he, about 2950 B.C. Wilson does not try to settle the accuracy of that chronology. It is enough for him that the most ancient Chinese copper cash is a disk with a square hole, so that the coins can be strung. That form corresponds to the large perforated shell-disks of the California Indians, and to specimens from ancient mounds. Hale regards the cash as a later metal imitation of the original shell money. A similar shell currency is in use among many Pacific islanders. Hale traces it from the Loo-Choo Islands across the archipelago to California, then overland, with the help of the mounds, to the Atlantic coast, where the Indians of Long Island were long noted for making it in the later form of wampum. The natives of Micronesia, Hale writes from his own observation, resemble the Polynesian groups in character, usage, and language, with differences careful observers have ascribed to northeastern Asia. They are noted for navigation, with well-rigged vessels exceeding sixty feet, and they sail by the stars on long voyages. To such voyagers the Pacific is no more formidable than the Atlantic was to the Northmen of the tenth century.

Through the same archipelago, exploration is finding remarkable stone structures and colossal figures, such as those from Easter Island now in the British Museum. Rude as they are, they suggest an affinity with the megalithic sculptures and cyclopean masonry of Peru. Captain Beechey noted monuments of this class long ago on some of the islands nearest the coasts of Chile and Peru. Since then the megalithic area has been extended through other groups lying toward Asia.

Another class of evidence, which he says he noted long since, is the artificial shaping of the skull. The Flathead Indians of Oregon and British Columbia take their name from it. Compressed skulls come from Peruvian cemeteries. The practice is widely diffused among American tribes, and he calls it one of the most characteristic American customs. The same evidence shows it among rude Asiatic Mongol tribes of primitive centuries, and still in use among the Huns and Avars who contended with the barbarians from the Baltic for the spoils of the decaying Roman empire. It was practiced in some Pacific islands, as Dr. Pickering described, and Kanaka skulls have confirmed that. Followed back, the custom carries him to the Macrocephali of the Euxine, noticed by Hippocrates and familiar to Strabo, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela.

Later change is also on record. The direct relationship of existing Polynesian languages is not Mongol but Malay, an intrusive element long after the growth of the features that still show Polynesian and American affinities. The number and diversity of American languages, and their essentially native vocabularies, prove a prolonged development free from contact with languages that were still modelling themselves on the same plan in many Pacific islands. The culture in some barbarous North American languages, which he traces to the part the orator played in deliberative assemblies, has excited surprise. For the history of the New World, philology has to deal with the languages of its civilized races.

Among those, Nahuatl has been appealed to, and the Mayas have been noted as a lettered people whose hieroglyphs and later transcripts are now under investigation. Maya contrasts, in its soft vocalic forms, with the languages immediately north of it. According to Stephens, it was affirmed to be still spoken by a living race beyond the Great Sierra, extending to Yucatan and the Mexican Gulf. Aymara and Quichua also invite study. Quichua was the classical language of South America, in which, according to native historians, the Peruvian chroniclers and poets incorporated the national legends. Under Inca rule it occupied a place analogous to Norman French in England from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. He calls Central America and Peru an occidental Assyria. If architecture, sculpture, and the hieroglyphs are modifications of a prehistoric Asiatic civilization, the evidence is to be looked for there. If the sculptor and the architect were brought by wanderers from an Asiatic fatherland, the potter and the metallurgist will also prove an inheritance from that hive.

Dates too recent, and an isolation that is real

Ethnically, then, the American is Mongol, and by the agglutinative element in many native languages may be classed as Turanian. Rask’s Finnic hypothesis, however modified by later reconsideration of the origin of the Aryans, and Huxley’s European melanochroic Metis, pertain to a prehistoric era of which the Finns and the Basques are assumed to be survivals. To that elder era, rather than to any date inside the remotest limits of authentic history, the languages of America seem to refer anyone who searches for a common origin with the eastern hemisphere.

The philologist already cited, Hyde Clarke, has sought linguistic traces that would better harmonize with traditions of intercourse between the maritime nations of the eastern Mediterranean and a continent outside the Pillars. He aims at the relations of Aztec or Nahuatl culture and language to those of Asia. Humboldt long ago claimed an Old World derivation for much of the former. Wilson thinks it premature to deduce comprehensive results from the meagre data. The author of The Khita and Khita-Peruvian Epoch, tracing his Sumerian race, assigns an interval of 4000 years since their settlement in Babylonia and India. On the assumption of a migration from a common Asiatic centre, which a division of Western and Eastern Sumerian in pronouns and other details is thought to indicate, Peru may have been reached by an earlier wave, from 4000 to 5000 years ago.

Mr. Hyde Clarke indeed conceives that it is quite within compass that the same great wave of migration which passed over India and Babylonia, continued to propagate its centrifugal force, and that by its means Peru was reached within the last 3000 years.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 26

But, whatever intercourse may possibly have then been carried on between the Old and the New World, it must be obvious, on mature reflection, that so recent a date for the peopling of South America from Asia is as little reconcilable with the very remote traces of linguistic affinity thus far adduced, as it is with any fancied relationship with a lost Atlantis of the elder world.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 26

With the comparative philologist, as with the archaeologist, time is more and more an all-important factor.

Leaving the centuries aside, the recently deciphered Akkad is accepted, in the researches he is reporting, as the typical language of the Sumerian class. That class is assumed to have started from High Asia and passed to Babylonia, while another branch diffused itself by India and Indo-China and thence, by the Pacific islands, reached America. In an illustrative table of Sumerian words under four heads, Western, Indo-Chinese, Peruvian, and Mexican, it is noted that while in some cases a root may be traced throughout, more commonly the western and American roots or types cross in the Indo-Chinese region. Another and older influence, related to the Agaw of the Nile region, is traced in Guarani, Omagua, and other languages of South America, indicating more remote relations with the Old World and with Africa. This is supposed to have been displaced by a Sumerian migration by which Aymara domination was established in Peru and the Maya element introduced into Yucatan. Those movements are assumed to belong to an era when the maritime enterprise of the Pacific may have been carried on upon a scale unknown to the most adventurous modern Malay navigators. A second migration is then recognized, in linguistic relations between Siamese and other languages of Indo-China and the Quichua and Aztec of Peru and Mexico. Wilson’s own judgment is that the problem is still in the preliminary stage, in which the accumulation of materials is of more value than the most comprehensive generalizations.

The vastness of the twin continents, with an Atlantic and a Pacific seaboard from the Arctic nearly to the Antarctic, tempts theories of migration on the grandest scale, and schemes of international relation in prehistoric centuries. They are not more substantial than the old legend of Atlantis. The best that can be said is that here are lines of research. Nor can the work wait. Eliot’s Narraganset Bible is the memorial of a race that has perished. Hale’s 1883 paper on the Tutelo tribe and language came from Nikonha, the last survivor of a once powerful tribe of North Carolina. Brinton’s notes on the Mangue recover another extinct language. On the northwestern Canadian prairies the buffalo has disappeared, and the Indian must follow.

Indications of grammatical affinity in South American languages, in the tense of the verb and in causative, reciprocal, potential, and locative verbs made by affixes, accord with the Polynesian idea. The Rev. Richard Garnett told the Philological Society that a South American verb is constructed precisely as those in Tamil and other languages of southern India: a verbal root, a second element defining the time, and a third denoting the subject or person.

The legend of the lost Atlantis is true in this, if in nothing else, that it relegates the knowledge of the world beyond the Atlantic, by the maritime races of the Mediterranean, to a time already of hoar antiquity in the age of Socrates, or even of Solon.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 29

At a greatly later date the Caribbean was scarcely more a mystery to dwellers on the Aegean than the Baltic or the North Sea. Herodotus expressly disbelieves in a river called by the barbarians Eridanus, flowing into a northern sea, from which there is a report that amber is wont to come. Nevertheless Greek traders exchanged personal ornaments and woven stuffs for the furs and amber of the North. They ascended the Dnieper as far as Gerrhos, a trading post forty days inland, and tokens of their presence have been recovered. Hoards of Greek coins minted in the fifth century B.C., and older golden gryphons of Assyrian workmanship, have been found near Bromberg in Posen and at Kiev on the Dnieper. On the most northern island of the Azores, hoards of Carthaginian coins have revealed the old Punic voyager. If still more ancient voyagers from Sidon, Tyre, or Seleucia did find their way to lands beyond the waste of waters, similar evidence may yet appear among the traces of native civilization in Central or South America.

The carving of names and dates is no modern custom. When the Greenland settlements of the tenth-century Northmen were discovered, the runes left no room for doubt. The same evidence shows them in the south, on the marble lion of the Piraeus, since carried to the arsenal of Venice, at Maeshowe in Orkney, in St. Molio’s Cave on the Clyde, at Kirk Michael in the Isle of Man, and on rocks by the Baltic. The Roman left inscriptions from the Moray Firth to the Libyan desert and from the Iberian shore to the Syrian valleys. In Italy, Perusinian, Eugubine, Etruscan, and Greek inscriptions tell a succession of races. It was the same back through Hellenic centuries to the inscription at Abbu Simbel. Dr. Isaac Taylor, in The Alphabet, places that cutting in a half-legendary period, more ancient even than the epoch assigned to Solon, Thales, and the seven wise men, the period from which the legend of Atlantis was professedly derived. Yet the graven characters still tell of the son of Theokles sailing with his company up the Nile when King Psamatichos came to Elephantina. Egyptians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, and the forgotten Hittites are in the same case. The lion of the Piraeus is a thing of yesterday beside the inscribed lion from Marash, with its Hittite hieroglyphs, in the museum at Constantinople. The Hittite capital Ketesh was captured by the Egyptian Sethos in 1340 B.C. All but the name of that people seemed to have perished, and the inscribed stones remained.

If traces of the lost Atlantis are ever recovered in the New World, it must be by some indubitable memorial of that kind. Graphic memorials, Assyrian, Phoenician, Khita, Egyptian, and Greek, still tell of times beyond the epoch assigned to Solon. The antiquaries of New England have sought in vain for runic memorials of the Northmen of the tenth century, and less trustworthy explorers have been stimulated to excess, with results little creditable to their honesty or their judgment. He will not guess what some chance disclosure may yet reveal. Thus far it appears improbable that, north of the Gulf of Mexico, evidences of a Phoenician, Greek, or other ancient historic race will now be found. Whatever transient visits may have been paid, no long-matured civilization, native or foreign, has existed there. Through all the centuries of definite history it has remained a world apart, with languages, arts, and customs essentially native.

Calendars, letters, and the missing stone

The Maya stock appear to have made the greatest progress of all the communities of Central America. They dwelt in cities adorned with costly structures for religion and the state, and they had political government and forms of social organization that look like the slow growth of many generations. They had a well-matured chronology, and they left graven and written records analogous to those of ancient Egypt, which still await decipherment. Whether that culture was purely native, or began from the germs of an Old World civilization, can be determined only when its secrets have been mastered. The region is even now very partially explored. There, he thinks, was the centre of a native American civilization, radiating light on either hand, before the Spanish conquest quenched it in blood. The civilization of Mexico was a borrowed reflex of Central America, and its picture-writing is a very inferior imitation of the Maya hieroglyphs.

A tendency manifests itself anew to trace the metallurgy, the letters, and the astronomical science of this leading race to an Asiatic or other Old World origin. The point is by no means established. He sees no reason why the human intellect might not be started on the same course in Central America as in Mesopotamia or the Nile valley. If the primary settlement had been by expeditions systematically carried on under some ancient maritime power of the Mediterranean, or of an early Iberian or Libyan seat, those settlers would have transplanted the arts of the old home. On the more probable supposition, of wanderers landed by the Atlantic or the Pacific and becoming undesigned settlers, it is otherwise. The probabilities shrink further if the wanderers came from island to island of the Pacific and reached the continent only after the traditions of an Asiatic fatherland had faded. The metallurgy of the Mexicans and Peruvians showed none of the matured phases of an inheritance. It had the tentative character of an immature native art.

He thinks we overestimate how easily the arts of civilization are transplanted. Take the average emigrant landed by thousands at New York, from the most civilized countries of Europe. Few could be relied on, left to their own resources, to turn the mineral wealth of a new home to account, or to construct a calendar and start a chronology. As to letters, Aztec picture-writing was the same in principle as the rude art of the northern Indians, and he cannot conceive of a reason for rejecting its native origin. Every step is still traceable, from the picturings on a grave-post or a rock to the systematic ideographs of Palenque or Copan. Hieroglyphs, as the outgrowth of pictures, must always have a general family likeness. Attempts to connect Central and South America with Egypt fail as soon as the calendars are compared. The vague year of 365 days, the corrected solar year, and the great Sothic cycle of 1460 years, interwoven with Egyptian religion and chronology, prove the correction of the Egyptian calendar by accumulated experience, long before Thales resorted to Egypt.

At the close of the fifteenth century, the Aztecs had learned to correct their calendar to solar time; but their cycle was one of only fifty-two years.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 33

The Peruvians also had recurrent religious festivals connected with the adjustment of their sacred calendar to solar time. Quito, their holy city, lies immediately under the equator, which greatly simplified the solstices and equinoxes and, he thinks, removed the stimulus to progress. The Mexican calendar is the most remarkable evidence of the civilization that people attained. Humboldt unhesitatingly connected it with the ancient science of southeastern Asia. Instead of the accumulated error that marks Egyptian historical chronology, its computation differed less from true solar time than the unreformed Julian calendar which the Spaniards had inherited from pagan Rome. That suffices to show that the civilization of Mexico was of no great antiquity, and it accords with other evidence of a borrowed character. The Mexicans stood to Central America as the northern barbarians of the third and fourth century stood to Italy, and the intruding Spaniard nipped the germ in the bud. A search limited to the northern continent is like an attempt to recover Greek and Roman civilization in transalpine Europe. The Mexican calendar stone is no more than the counterpart of some stray Greek or Roman tablet beyond the Alps, or of some product of borrowed art.

Certain conclusion has to wait on the intelligent exploration of Central America. On the sculptured tablets of Palenque, Quiriqua, Chichenitza, and Uxmal, and on the colossal statues at Copan and other ancient sites, are inscriptions awaiting the Young or Champollion of American palaeography. The whole region was once occupied by a lettered race, with the same written characters and a common civilization. If they owed the invention of letters to some apostle from the Mediterranean, letters which, as Bacon says, pass like ships through the seas of time, then some graphic memorial of the messenger should be recoverable, confirming the oft-recurring traditions of bearded white men who came from beyond the sea, introduced the arts, and were reverenced as divine benefactors. It cannot be, he argues, that Egyptian, Assyrian, Hittite, and Phoenician traces still survive in the Old World, and that the Northmen’s runes have put their pre-Columbian explorations beyond question, and yet that not a single trace of Mediterranean wanderers to the lost Atlantis survives.

In Humboldt’s Researches a fragment of a reputed Phoenician inscription is engraved.

It was copied by Ranson Bueno, a Franciscan monk, from a block of granite which he discovered in a cavern in the mountain chain, between the Orinoco and the Amazon.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 35

Humboldt recognized some resemblance to the Phoenician alphabet. Wilson remembers what rudely traced Phoenician characters are, and presumes that the transcriber had no knowledge of Phoenician. Humboldt says the good monk seemed but little interested in this pretended inscription, though he had copied it very carefully.

The lost Atlantis, then, lies still in the future.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 35

Earlier study of the monuments seemed to him to point conclusively to a native source. From quipu and wampum, pictured grave-post and buffalo robe, to the most finished hieroglyphs of Copan or Palenque, continuous steps appear by which American man developed for himself the invention of letters which legend ascribed to Thoth or Mercury, or, less mythically, to the Phoenician Cadmus. The generally accepted assumption of a foreign origin for American metallurgy has not been placed on any substantial basis. Gold, as he believes, was everywhere the first metal wrought. The bright nugget tempted the savage, with whom personal ornaments precede dress. The same is true, in a less degree, of copper, and wherever native copper abounds the next step is to be anticipated. With the economic use of the metals came tools, architecture, sculpture, pictorial ornamentation, and so ideography. The facilities were at least as abundant in Central and South America as in Egypt. When the Neolithic age began to yield to the metallurgist, the important step had been taken. The history of that step is embodied in myths of the New World as of the Old. Tubal-cain, Daedalus, Hephaestus, Vulcan, Voelund, Galant, and Wayland the Saxon smith-god are legendary variations of the first mastery of the metals, and so too the New World has Quetzalcoatl, its divine instructor in the same art.

It is, for him, an indisputable fact that long before Greece became the intellectual leader, the eastern Mediterranean was settled by maritime races whose enterprise led them to navigate the Atlantic. There was no greater impediment to their crossing that ocean in the earliest centuries before Christ than at any later date before the revival of navigation in the fifteenth century. It would not surprise him to learn of a genuine Phoenician or other inscription, or of a hoard of Assyrian gryphons, or of shekels of the merchant princes of Tyre “that had knowledge of the sea,” among the unexplored treasures of the buried empire of Montezuma or the deserted ruins of Central America. Such a discovery would scarcely be more surprising than the Punic hoards at Corvo, the most westerly island of the Azores. It would furnish a substantial basis for the legend of Atlantis, akin to the basis the runic monuments of Kingiktorsoak and Igalikko gave to a Hesperian region inside the Arctic circle, and to the first glimpses of the American mainland by Norse voyagers of the tenth century, as told in more than one of the old sagas.

But until such evidence is forthcoming, the legendary Atlantis must remain a myth, and pre-Columbian America be still credited with a self-achieved progress.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 36

The Vinland of the Northmen

This study, pages 37 to 80, is the working-out of the Norse contact he has just called historical. It is not another argument for a sunken continent. He sets the Greek legend beside other western fancies, and then tries to say what the sagas actually support.

The idea that the western hemisphere was known to the Old World, prior to the ever-memorable voyage of Columbus four centuries ago, has reproduced itself in varying phases, not only in the venerable Greek legend of the lost Atlantis; and the still vaguer myth of the Garden of the Hesperides on the far ocean horizon, the region of the setting sun; but in mediaeval fancies and mythical epics.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 37

He quotes the Breton’s speech in William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, about gardens ever blossoming across the western sea. He notes the Island of St. Brandon, retreat of an Irish hermit of the sixth century, and the “Seven Islands” to which, in the time of the Caliph Walid and Musa, Christians of Gothic Spain are said to have fled under seven bishops when the peninsula passed to the Saracens in the eighth century. The Eyrbyggja Saga has Biorn Ashbrandsson, escaped from a tempest raised by an enemy skilled in the black art, found “in the latter days of Olaf the Saint” in a strange land beyond the ocean, chief of a warlike race that seemed to speak Irish. Later commentators call it White Man’s Land. An imaginary island of Brazil flitted about the charts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries until exploration extinguished it.

Madoc, son of Owen Gwyneth, king of North Wales, is given a more definite tale. About A.D. 1170 he is said to have sailed west, away from his brother Yorwerth, found a home in the New World, returned for colonists, and vanished. Southey believed the legend enough to note that strong evidence had been adduced, and that Madoc’s posterity still existed on the southern branch of the Missouri, keeping their complexion, language, and some of their arts. Later exploration found no “Welsh Indians” there. Wilson’s own check is local. In 1874, digging mounds in the Ohio valley, he dined in a Welsh settlement a few miles from Newark, where a generation born in America still used Welsh, including the grace before dinner and the services of a Calvinistic Congregational church and a Methodist church. The farmer told him the district had been settled by a Welsh colony in 1802. Southey’s Madoc was published in 1805. Wilson’s point is that a real later settlement, plus a poem, is enough to crystallize a twelfth-century discovery. A pamphleteer denounced Southey for attributing the discovery to “a vagabond Welsh prince” and so injuring Columbus and the honor of America.

He repeats that gradations from Indian picture-writing to the ideographs of Central and South America leave no necessity for a foreign source. The world beyond the Atlantic had remained apart until 1492, and there was a disposition to resent any rivalry with Columbus. The Scandinavian colonists of Iceland had the real claim. The epoch, for him, is 1837, when the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries, Professor Charles Christian Rafn editing, issued the Antiquitates Americanae. Those disclosures are modern beside the mythic antiquities of Plato’s Atlantis, and they nevertheless added some five centuries to the history of the New World. The Grönland’s Historiske Mindesmærker of 1845 recalled the Greenland settlements. From the saga of Eric the Red he quotes the talk at Brattahlid that Vinland the Good should be explored, and the fitting out of a ship by Karlsefni and Snorri.

The Northmen supplied the maritime energy of Europe from the fifth to the tenth century, and he traces the rise of the Italian maritime republics, including the one that produced the discoverer of America, to that northern element. Of their discovery of some portion of the mainland of North America before the eleventh century, he says there can be no reasonable doubt. The wonder is that the southern explorations stayed partial and transient. Eric Thorvaldsson, Eric the Red, a banished Icelandic jarl, settled the Greenland coast at Igalikko, or Brattalid as it was first called. The settlement is put apparently in 985. One of the runic inscriptions in the Copenhagen museum came from there.

Before the close of the century, if not in the very year A.D. 1000, in which St. Olaf was introducing Christianity into Norway, Leif, or Leiv Ericson, a son of the first coloniser of Greenland, appears to have accidentally discovered the American mainland.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 44

The story most often gives Leif an exploratory voyage in quest of southern lands already reported by Bjarni Herjulfson. The saga in which Bjarni first appears is a manuscript of the latter part of the fourteenth century, with amplifications and inconsistencies that justify rejecting it as a reason to take the discovery away from Leif. Leif was on his way from Norway to Greenland when he was driven out of his course, as Cabral, five centuries later, was driven to Brazil. Thorfinn’s attempt at a settlement, within a few years of Leif’s reported discovery, is for Wilson the simple and consistent narrative. Later sagas gather fable around a goodly land of the vine that had faded.

Helluland, from hella, a flat stone, a barren coast and ice-clad mountains, Rafn’s editor identified with Newfoundland. Professor Gustav Storm prefers Labrador. Markland, the woodland, Rafn made Nova Scotia. Storm says it can have been no other country than Newfoundland. A further landfall, where the dew on the grass tasted sweet, was taken for Nantucket. The river and the lake were taken for the Pacasset River and Mount Hope Bay. A southerner, sudrmadr, reported wine-trees and grapes, and the name Vinland followed. Montgomery’s Greenland of 1819, with no American pride of locality, read the shortest day, sun about eight o’clock, as about the forty-ninth degree, Newfoundland or the St. Lawrence. Storm’s Studier over Vinlandsreiserne reaches a nearly similar limit.

Vinland cannot have lain farther north than 49°.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 46

How far southward of this its site may be sought for is matter of conjecture; but all probabilities are opposed to its discovery so far south as Rhode Island.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 46

Rafn, encouraged by the Rhode Island antiquaries, produced the Dighton Rock and its assumed runes, the Newport Round Tower, and “The Skeleton in Armour,” on which Longfellow founded a ballad. Rafn’s own sum put the sand-banks of Nova Scotia, the beaches of Cape Cod, and a shortest day of nine hours at latitude 41 degrees 24 minutes 10 seconds, the promontories of Mount Hope Bay, with Leif’s booths and a head establishment named Hop. Wilson thinks that local evidence fails, and that the saga topography is too vague to force the voyagers past Cape Cod. The wild grape, he notes, grows in sheltered places in Nova Scotia, so the name Vinland does not by itself require Rhode Island. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence south, many an estuary would fit the temporary settlement of Thorfinn. Fresh claimants contend for the landing. He does not award it.

On the way he notices an inscribed stone near the ocean in Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia, which if not runic or Phoenician is supposed by many to be the work of man, and he remarks that the first idea, when any alphabetic-looking marks appear in the western hemisphere, has been to suggest a Phoenician origin. He does not adopt that suggestion. He also notes that the tide of Eskimo migration, in comparatively modern centuries, has set westward across Behring Strait and by the Aleutian Islands into Asia, which matches what he said in the Atlantis study.

The word flood occurs twice, and neither time is a deluge tradition. A saga detail has great bars at a river mouth, so that it could be entered only at the height of the flood tide. Later he quotes Othello on “moving accidents by flood and field,” as Raleigh’s kind of traveller’s tale, including the Ewaipanoma of the Caoro in Guiana, men whose heads were said to grow beneath their shoulders. Shakespeare’s Caliban, he says, is an anagram of the epithet Raleigh couples with those people. That is Elizabethan marvel, not a flood myth.

He does return to Plato, as one of the dreams of an island-world with a civilization of its own. Vague intimations, seemingly from Egypt, encouraged belief in a submerged island or continent, once the seat of arts and learning, far on the Atlantic. The most definite narrative is the one in the Timaeus, on an account Solon had from an Egyptian priest. The temple records of the Nile reached back beyond the infantile fables of the Greeks, who still preserved some memory of deluges and convulsions. In one of them the vast island of Atlantis, a continent larger than Libya and Asia conjoined, had been engulfed in the ocean that bears its name. Plato revived that ocean-world as the seat of his imaginary commonwealth. It had not long been a world of fact when Sir Thomas More made it anew the seat of Utopia. More’s Raphael, companion of Amerike Vespuce on his third voyage, never said in what part of the new world Utopia stands. Wilson’s joke is that there is then no reason not to locate that perfect commonwealth in the young Canadian Dominion, once its polity deserves it. Dunbar, in “Of the world’s instabilitie,” still treats “Calicut and the new-found Isle” as a far place from which a benefice might have come in shorter while, upwards of twenty years after the discoverer’s return. Sir David Lindsay, in the Dreme, has Dame Remembrance teach that the earth was tripartite, Africa, Europe, and Asia, with Africa and Europe still the Occident. Many famous isles in “the ocean-sea” attract notice, but the new world is not yet a solid fact.

He closes on later dreamers of a western perfectibility. Berkeley landed at Rhode Island with a project of a university for the regeneration of the New World aborigines, bought a farm, stayed three years, and never received the promised English grant. Southey, Coleridge, and the Bristol pantisocrats made a Utopia “where Susquehanna pours his untamed stream.” The study’s Atlantis claim is the one already stated. The Norse voyages are history of a modest kind. The engulfed continent remains a dream Plato used, and More used again.

Trade and Commerce in the Stone Age

Pages 81 to 129 argue that trade, a division of labor, and a medium of exchange are already visible in the Stone Age, in Europe and in America. The name “Stone Period” or “Stone Age” was suggested in the early years of the nineteenth century by the antiquaries of Denmark for the era, in western Europe and among other peoples, when metals were unknown. Thomsen of Copenhagen made the classification. Wilson thinks the useful service of fire on the hearth is coeval with man as a rational being, while the smelting of ores took the accumulated experience of many generations. Sir John Evans is his reference for curious indications of the antiquity of flint as a fire-producer. He then follows workshops, caches, and the movement of raw stone far from its source.

The flood language here is geological or local, plus one native deluge legend. John Frere’s flint implements, and Boucher de Perthes in 1847 entitling a book Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes, used “antediluvian” when the antiquity of man, as now understood, was still unthought of. Wilson says the word then sufficed as a vague expression of remote indefinite antiquity, for which “pre-Celtic” would have been accepted as an equivalent. He is not adopting a great deluge. Floods also appear as the agency that shaped drift deposits, as the ice-laden summer floods that laid the Philadelphia Red Gravel and Brick Clay, as rain standing in a level enclosure, and as the Ohio freshets that exposed spear points, including the great flood of the winter of 1862 and 1863. Those are river floods.

The origin claim that belongs with other writers is the pipestone legend. Catlinite, the red pipestone of the Couteau des Prairies, was carried in rough blocks and bartered. Pipes of many tribal patterns are made of it, from grave mounds down the Mississippi, east to the Atlantic, and west beyond the Rockies. Dr. George M. Dawson in 1874 found part of an ancient catlinite pipe on Pyramid Creek, about latitude 49 degrees, longitude 105 degrees. Wilson had watched his own guides on the Neepigon carry a pipe-stone for a fully 800 miles (1287 kilometers). Dr. Robert Bell described a green serpentine pipe, of a Chippewayan pattern, brought to the Nelson River from Reindeer Lake, several hundred miles north of Frog Portage on the Churchill.

This flesh-coloured rock has suggested the Sioux legend of its origin in the flesh of the antediluvian red men, who perished there in the great deluge.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 120

He reports the legend. He does not argue it. The rock is soft, of fine texture, and easily wrought, which is why widely severed tribes coveted it. Sioux and Blackfoot both still kept such pipes as cherished possessions.

The study ends on the same remote horizon as the first essay, without adding a new Atlantis theory. The principles on which the wealth of nations depends were already in operation, he says, ages before the merchants of Tyre, or the traders of Massala, had learned to turn the mineral resources of the Cassiterides to account, or that vaguer and still more remote era before the ancient Atlantis had vanished from the ken of the civilized dwellers around the Mediterranean Sea. That is a glance back, not a new claim about where Atlantis sank or who escaped it.

Pre-Aryan American Man

Pages 130 to 184 are a plea to record the northern nations before they disappear, and an argument about how far American man is native, how far Asiatic, and how old the rude stone arts of the north really are. It is not an Atlantis essay. He says the legends of more ancient explorers, and the whole question of migration from the Mediterranean, have already been discussed in the Lost Atlantis study. What he adds is the northern evidence, and a repeated refusal to derive the arts of the north from Egypt or from Asia.

The prairie tribes are vanishing with the buffalo. The Flatheads of diverse types, and the Haidahs of the Queen Charlotte Islands, are giving up distinctive customs and mixing foreign matter into their traditions. When Paul Kane travelled in 1846, the Flathead Indians of Oregon and British Columbia included populous settlements of Cowlitz, Chinook, and Newatee. Now, he says, the Bureau of Ethnology finds only three survivors who speak Clatsop and one who knows Chinook. Only one Klaskane is known, and the Tutelo language has been rescued from a single representative. A large influx of Chinese complicates the problem. The key, for the peopling of the continent, is the native languages.

Columbus was not the first European of the Christian era to colonize the western hemisphere. The Northmen’s presence rests on indubitable evidence. The very definiteness of that northern retreat helps, he says, to destroy faith in merely conjectural settlements along the Atlantic seaboard. Runic inscriptions on the Canadian and New England coasts would, if genuine, give a novel aspect to pre-Columbian history. They would still not prove relationship in blood, language, arts, or customs between any eastern people and the native American races. Indications of an Asiatic source keep being offered, and in nearly every ethnical classification the Americans are, with good reason, ranked as Mongolidae. If the pedigree is Asiatic, the evidence of direct affinity has yet to be marshalled. Language yields only remote analogies. Archaeology has given partial aid. He thinks the compass of American archaeology, even including the lettered races of Central and South America, is greatly circumscribed beside Europe, and that the simplicity has a compensating value. There is little to lend countenance to a theory of degeneracy from a higher life.

He spends much of the study on the palaeolithic claim. Rudeness is not antiquity. Some stone tools still in use in America are as artless as anything in the drift, and the crudest modern work is not in the Arctic but in southern latitudes. Professor Leidy, in a United States Geological Survey report for 1872, found implements at the base of the Uintah Mountains in southern Wyoming so rude that he was constantly in doubt which were artificial, mingled with others of fine finish. The Shoshones seemed to him incapable of the finer work and called the tools a gift of the Great Spirit to their ancestors. Professor Dawkins, in Early Man in Britain, compared Eskimo refuse heaps, bone and ivory tools, and drawings with the cave-men of the Garonne, and held that the points of connection can be explained only if they belong to the same race. Wilson answers that the imitative art is common to many savage peoples, that no modern savage people has shown the skill of the Cro-Magnon draughtsmen, and that an Eskimo arrow-straightener with a formal row of reindeer is not the grazing reindeer of the Kesslerloch. He will not recover the hyperborean of Canada as the living cave-man of Pleistocene Europe.

The Trenton gravels are his American river-drift. Under them lies the older Columbia gravel, which has also yielded a smaller number of palaeoliths. Hilborne T. Cresson’s work in Delaware, and disclosures in Ohio and Indiana, leave him no longer in doubt that reliable traces have been recovered of American man contemporary with the mammoth and the mastodon, a hunter of the reindeer in the valley of the Delaware, like the cave-dwellers of Cro-Magnon. He also repeats Dr. Abbott’s warning. The continent has scarcely emerged from its Stone Age, and modern implements get into old gravels by burial, by uprooted trees, and by freshets cutting a new channel. Professor Henry C. Lewis, of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, concluded that at the time of the Trenton gravel flood, man in a rude state, with habits like those of the river-drift hunter of Europe, lived on the banks of the ancient Delaware and lost his stone implements in the shifting sands. A local glacier in the Catskill Mountains, with floating ice, is offered as enough to form those gravels. That “flood” is a geological river flood. It is not the great deluge, and it is not Atlantis.

On metals he is consistent with the first study. Whether brought from Asia or found for themselves, the mastery of ores by fire was already familiar to Peruvian metallurgists and not unknown in Mexico. Unalloyed copper, such as abounds on the Keweenaw peninsula of Lake Superior, is extremely difficult to cast. A small percentage of tin makes bronze and makes the copper more fusible. That secret, he says, the metallurgists of Peru discovered for themselves. Mexican paintings show tribute paid in wedges of copper. The forms of chisels and other bronze tools are simple. Hafting is nearly as rude as the fitting of a handle to a flint hatchet, and the whole character suggests a recently acquired art, derived from the civilized races on whom they had intruded as conquerors. Such knowledge must have come from the south. North of the Mexican Gulf he looks in vain for anything more than hammered native copper, untouched by fire. Mr. Perkins, quoted by Dr. J. W. Foster, thought markings showed that the Mound-Builders smelted copper. The illustrations scarcely bear it out. Charles Rau, in Ancient Aboriginal Trade in North America, says that fire on the hearths or altars now enclosed by sacrificial mounds was sometimes strong enough to melt deposited copper, and that this still did not induce the ancient inhabitants to work copper with fire. They persisted in hammering. One copper axe, evidently cast, is the sort of exception that does not make a copper age.

His picture of the northern hunter is the origin claim to set beside the first study. The Red Man of the Northwest exhibits no change from his precursors of the fifteenth century. For all that appears in him of a capacity for self-development, the forests and prairies may have sheltered hunting and warring tribes, just as they pastured the buffalo, for countless centuries since the continent rose from its ocean bed. He offers hereditary feud, more destructive than tigers or wolves, as the way to account for so unprogressive a condition, in a country of rivers, lakes, forests, and a climate fit for agriculture, with the copper of Lake Superior lying ready. The study adds no new Atlantis theory. It says the northern arts do not require one.

The Æsthetic Faculty in Aboriginal Races

Pages 185 to 245 are a comparison of imitative art, from the palaeolithic caves of Europe to the picture-writing, carving, and pottery of America. The Atlantis sentence is in the first lines, and it is a refusal.

The ingenious arts of the palaeolithic cave-dwellers of the Vézère abundantly prove that it needed no wanderers from the cradle-lands of Old World civilisation to that strange Atlantis lying in the engirdling ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, to engraft their artistic capacities on the "Achoriens" by whom it was peopled.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 185

The innate faculty for art has appeared, with unaccountable partiality, among Assyrian, Egyptian, Hellenic, Arabian, and mediaeval races, and later among Frank, Fleming, and Dane. Its absence is compatible with the highest intellectual triumphs in other directions. Britain’s Allophylian arts show no instinctive aim at reproducing natural objects. The stock of Shakespeare and Newton had no native school of painting or sculpture to rival the Renaissance or the Low Countries until a recent generation. It is otherwise, he says, with the New World. The highest stage of civilization attained there is a very partial one, but an aptitude for imitative art is very widely diffused, from the rude Indian nomad and the Eskimo to the Zuni and the metallurgists and architects of Central America and Peru. It is not peculiar to the New World, and not characteristic of all its nationalities, but it appears more generally diffused there than elsewhere.

He uses a Scottish cist, found in 1851 at Juniper Green near Edinburgh, as a link with the Red Indian nomad. A male skeleton lay on the left side, arms folded, knees drawn up to the elbows, the head on a water-worn stone, and a clay vase at the right shoulder that had held food. Skull and vase went to the Archaeological Museum of Edinburgh. Artificial modification of the head in ancient British crania, set beside skulls from Indian grave mounds, is one of his old comparisons. For the recent barrows and cairns of prehistoric Europe, the analogy with American art fails. For the much older men of the mammoth and reindeer periods, it holds in a different way. The engravings on horn and ivory from the caves are, in his view and in Sir Noel Paton’s, immensely superior to modern Eskimo or other savage work of the same kind. Paton compares them to swift studies from nature by Landseer, set against the labored scrawling of a dull schoolboy. Some of the Perigord drawings, and the Kesslerloch reindeer, are left-hand drawings. He classes the cave pictures with American picture-writing, including its most advanced Mexican stage in Lord Kingsborough’s folios, as a supplement of language, a visible speech beyond gesture, and a record of extinct fauna more trustworthy than a written chronicle.

The rest of the study is a gallery of that faculty. Gesture-language, Chinook jargon, pipe-carving, and living artists. Pabahmesad, an old Chippewa of the Great Manitoulin Island, was famed for pipe-carving. Zacharee Thelariolin, of the Huron remnant on the St. Charles near Quebec, who claimed to be the last full-blood of the band, painted in oil. A portrait of himself in Indian costume, done at sixty-six and owned by Mr. Clint of Quebec, is Wilson’s example of an untaught hereditary faculty. Edmonia Lewis, sculptor, whose studio in Rome tourists knew, had a Negro father and a Chippewa mother, was born at Greenbush on the Hudson, and was reared among the Indians until fourteen. Her Indian name was Suhkuhegareaua, or Wildfire. She took the name Edmonia Lewis at the Moravian school at Oberlin.

One origin phrase belongs with flood comparisons, and it is a translator’s analogy, not a deluge narrative. In the Chinook jargon, a Chihalis word for “first” or “before,” joined to a Chinook word for people, is used of a race of beings who preceded the Indians as inhabitants of the world, just as English speaks of the antediluvians. He notes it in passing, in a discussion of how the jargon makes compound words, and says that branch of the subject lies apart from the aim of the paper. Hale had found Canadians and half-breeds married to Chinook women who could converse with their wives only in this speech, and children to whom the factitious language was really the mother tongue. The study’s Atlantis sentence is the one already quoted. It adds no sunken land, no Mu, and no Lemuria.

The Huron-Iroquois; a Typical Race

Pages 246 to 306 present the Huron-Iroquois as the typical race of the north, and then ask what their traditions, language, and arts imply about origin. The St. Lawrence valley was their habitat as far back as evidence can be appealed to. Huron traditions tell of a time when the province of Quebec, eastward to the sea, was the home of the race. Three members at least of the Iroquois confederacy claimed, in legendary fashion, a birth from the soil south of the great river. Jacques Cartier in 1535 found at Stadacone and Hochelaga, the sites of Quebec and Montreal, a population apparently of this stock. Canada, so far as the traditions may be trusted, was then populous through the St. Lawrence valley with industrious tribes who had occupied the region for unnumbered centuries.

Brownell is quoted for fanciful tales of a supernatural origin from the heart of a mountain, a migration to the eastern seaboard, and a return to the country of the lakes. Wilson treats the mountain story as the Greek metaphor of the autochthones, the children of the soil, like the Athenians with the grasshopper in their hair. Horatio Hale heard it from Manderong, an old Wyandot, as told by the Hurons of Lorette. They showed him the opening in the mountain from which the progenitors emerged when they first came out of the ground. The Huron chief Tahourenche, Francois Xavier Picard, told Wilson the same legend, with a smile. They came out of the side of a mountain between Quebec and the great sea. He connected this with a traditional belief that the northern shores of the lower St. Lawrence were the original home, and he spoke of ancient events as having occurred when they lived beside the big sea. The earliest authentic reference Wilson cites is the Relations for 1636. Brebeuf, after a brief allusion to magical songs and dances, says the origin of all such mysteries is assigned to a being of superhuman stature, wounded in the forehead by one of their nation at the time when they lived near the sea. Wilson reads the seaboard migration as an epoch in the life of the nation, like the Hegira, not as an arrival from another continent.

When Champlain followed Cartier nearly seventy years later, only a few Algonkins in birch-bark wigwams stood where the palisaded Huron-Iroquois towns had been. No Algonkin legend claims that valley as their early home. Ojibway tradition points to Lake Superior and the country toward Hudson Bay. David Cusick, the Tuscarora historian, and Peter Dooyentate, the Wyandot historian, lead him to the same conclusion. From remote pre-Columbian centuries the Hurons and allied tribes held the region their oldest traditions made the cradle, with Algonkins to the northwest. The five nations south of the river were Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. The Hurons were the oldest representatives of the common race. The stock spread south through Conestoga or Andaste, Susquehannock, Erie, Nottoway, and Tuscarora, as far as North Carolina. Gallatin surmised a Cherokee connection. Hale has placed it beyond doubt: a grammatical structure mainly Huron-Iroquois, with a vocabulary largely foreign, which he is inclined to read as refugees of the conquered Alligewi, far south in Alabama and Georgia, adopted into an Iroquois nation. The overthrow of the Alligewi in the Ohio valley, remembered by the Lenni-Lenape and by the Iroquois, is now, Wilson says, assigned to a date nearly contemporary with Egbert of Wessex as Bretwalda. The famous league’s own incidents seem assignable to the fifteenth century. In 1714 the Tuscaroras, driven from North Carolina, were received into the league, which then became the Six Nations.

Peter Jones, Kahkewaquonaby, a civilized Ojibway adopted into the Mohawk nation, gives the tradition of origin he had been able to gain. Many winters ago the Great Spirit, Keche-Manedoo, created the Indians. Every nation speaking a different language is a second creation, but all were made by the same Supreme Being. Whitney’s remark on Basque as a stepping-stone is repeated, with Whitney’s own warning that to group all American languages in a single family is “a classification of ignorance.” The possibilities of an ancient crossing, and of colonists from the Mediterranean, have already been discussed in the Lost Atlantis study. The interval implied would not erase all traces of linguistic affinity. It would be vain to hope for historical guidance from the oldest Iroquois legends. If Iberian, Hittite, Egyptian, Phoenician, or other of the world’s gray fathers transplanted the germs of the indigenous stock, we look in vain for any traces of their Old World civilization north of the Mexican Gulf. Nor is it established that the arts of Central America or Peru are of any very great antiquity. Their metallurgy was crude but suggestive, not likely to have been long arrested. The hieroglyphs present analogies to the Chinese phase of word-writing, which may modify the estimate of duration, but an antiquity approximating that of Egypt seems irreconcilable with the evidence. Central American architecture was barbaric, imposing in scale, with numerous ill-lighted little chambers like honeycomb cells, suggestive of the Casas Grandes and the Zuni pueblos, and confirmed by the ornament of Pueblo pottery. Mexican art looks to him like the first successful intrusion of northern barbarians on the seats of tropical civilization.

The physical comparison is the same refusal of a single American type. Humboldt, who did not know the northern dolichocephalic races, dwelt on the resemblance to Asiatic Mongols. Latham classes both as Mongolidae. Pickering reached the same conclusion. The resemblance falls short of physical identity. Morton’s figures, 1421 for eighteen Mongol skulls and 1234 for 164 American skulls other than Peruvian or Mexican, are in some respects misleading. The mean of 214 American skulls in the Peabody Museum, including many females, is 1331. Twenty-six male California skulls yield 1470. Huron-Iroquois crania would rank among such exceptional examples. The forehead is low and receding, but Morton notes an approximation to the European mean. Uniformity of ethnical character is untenable. Probabilities favor different ethnical centres, a diversity of origin, and considerable admixture.

All evidence, moreover, whether physical or philological, whatever else it may prove, leaves no room for doubt as to a greatly prolonged period of isolation of the native races of the New World.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 261

He then sets the routes side by side without choosing one. They may have come from the Mediterranean, in that old mythic dawn whose memory survived in the legend of a submerged Atlantis. Or the history of a primeval migration may still linger in fading traces of philological affinity with the Basques. Or, with the still more remote glimpses assumed from Arctic ethnology, one may follow the palaeolithic race of central Europe’s reindeer period to Behring Strait and so to the later home of the American Mongol. This at least becomes more and more obvious: they brought with them no arts derived from the ancient civilizations of Egypt or of Asia. So far as the northern continent is concerned, nothing suggests that the aborigines greatly differed, at any earlier period, from the condition in which Cartier found them. They were absolutely ignorant of metallurgy. Notwithstanding the abundance of pure native copper, they cannot be said even to have attained the stage Europe calls its Copper Age. Copper was no more than a malleable stone, fashioned with stone hammers. Pottery was hand-fashioned by the women, without the wheel. Skins of bear and deer sufficed for clothing. They had not advanced beyond the neolithic savage of Europe’s Stone Age when, at the close of the fifteenth century, they were brought into contact with its cultured arts.

Parkman, in The Jesuits in North America, is quoted with approval and with a limit. Among all the barbarous nations of the continent the Iroquois stand paramount. The Iroquois was the Indian of Indians, a thorough savage, yet a finished and developed savage, perhaps the highest elevation man can reach without emerging from the primitive condition of the hunter. Parkman does not believe that, left undisturbed, they would ever have developed a civilization of their own. Wilson adds that they had not taken the first step in that direction. The study’s Atlantis sentence is the one that leaves a Mediterranean dawn, and the legend of a submerged Atlantis, as an open possibility which still brought no Egyptian or Asiatic arts into the north. The origin tradition he records from the Hurons themselves is a birth from a mountain by the lower St. Lawrence, not a landing from a lost island.

Hybridity and Heredity

Pages 307 to 338 ask what four centuries of European and African migration, and of mixture with the native races, have done to the stocks involved. The opening restates the isolation he has argued all through the book, and then leaves Atlantis behind.

The western hemisphere, which was the arena of such ethnical development, had lain, for unnumbered centuries, apart from Asia and Europe; and so its various nationalities and races were left to work out their own destinies, and to develop in their own way whatever inherent capacities for progress pertained to them.

Daniel Wilson. The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies (1892), p. 307

From the rude condition of savage life, without metallurgy, subsisting solely by the chase, to the comparatively civilized nations of Mexico, Central America, and Peru, skilled in agriculture and possessed of a writing that embodied the essential germs of intellectual progress, that development was their own. It was then abruptly brought into intimate relations with Europe by the maritime discoveries at the close of the fifteenth century. From that date a constant transfer of races from the Old World to the New, voluntary and enforced, has been an undesigned ethnological experiment on the grandest scale. He wants to know to what extent the European and the African are affected by migration to new regions, and by admixture.

The rest is that experiment, not a lost-continent argument. Colonization of outlying territory begins with a migration of males, and the cry comes from Australia, Canada, and elsewhere for female emigration, a state of things as old as the dispersion of the human race. He cites Colbert’s letters to the Canadian intendant on wives for the settlers, bounties on marriage, and a system of female emigration. He follows the frontier from the days of Columbus and Cabot, pioneer bands and the solitary hunter. He notes Chinese immigration into the United States and eastern Canada, until it has been deemed politic to forbid more of it, an intrusion of a type approximating to the American Mongol. He printed queries on the Indian and circulated them to officers of the Indian Department, hoping to record the native population before European influx effaced it.

In the old provinces the native tribes, under many names, fall into two groups, Algonkin and Iroquois. Under the first he ranks the Micmacs and other tribes of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and the Chippeways, including Ottawas, Mississagas, and Pottawattomies, of Ontario. Under the second, the Six Nations, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora, and the Wyandots or Hurons of Upper and Lower Canada. The one were allies of the English, the other adhered to the French, and the enmity between them expelled the Hurons from the Georgian Bay and left only a remnant, including the refugees on the St. Charles below Quebec. He uses the Canadian census of 1871, which counts the aborigines of Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. The Indian population on reserved lands, under government superintendents, is not, he finds, diminishing in numbers. The pure race is largely being replaced by younger generations of mixed blood, so the results do not encourage a hope of perpetuating the native race under those conditions. The increase is partly begot by a foreign element. At best the process is absorption, where a race inferior in numbers and in progressive energy escapes extirpation. The study adds no Atlantis, no flood, and no Mu. Its origin claim is the restatement that the hemisphere lay apart for unnumbered centuries, and then the record of mixture after 1492.

Relative Racial Brain-Weight and Size

Pages 339 to 402 are a craniological paper. Professor Owen has made the brain the basis of a classification that separates man, as a sub-class, from all other mammals. Wilson grants that a comparison with the anthropoid apes confirms a relation between cerebral development and intellectual power, and then says the distinctive features of the human brain, as against the anthropomorpha, are greatly less than had been assumed. The substantial difference is in volume. He quotes Darwin, in The Descent of Man, that no one doubts the connection between the large size of the human brain, relative to the body, and man’s higher mental powers, as against the gorilla or the orang. A careful study, Wilson answers, shows remarkable deviations from any simple scale on which the intellectual man would stand above the stolid, and the civilized man above the savage. Inequality between the organic source of power and the manifestations of power is the caution he starts from.

The rest is measurement. Tables compare Negro brain-weight, the cubical capacity of skulls of different races, the cranial capacity and brain-weight of distinguished men, maximum brain-weights, average weight at different ages, and crania of Pacific coast tribes. He discusses named skulls, among them Robert the Bruce, Burns, and Dante, and the traps of different standards of weight and of different materials used to fill a skull. Dr. Isaac Taylor’s Origin of the Aryans comes in for the Canstadt man as a primitive savage, and some observers have seen a reversion to that type in a modern skull. That is a remark about European cranial form. It is not a claim about a lost continent, a flood, or an antediluvian civilization. I find no Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, great-deluge, or antediluvian claim in this study. It is the last of the monographs his daughter said were linked by a slender ethnographic thread, and the thread here is race and brain, not Plato’s island.