Aboriginal Races of America [pp. 59-92]

1853.] Aboriginal Races of Amtnerica. 87
vations of many others, as well as our own. These charac ters, too, pervade all the American races, ancient and mod ern, over the whole continent. We have compared many
heads of living tribes, Cherokees, Choctaws, Mexicans, etc.,
as well as the crania from mounds of all ages, and the same
general characters pervade all.
Col. Hamilton Smith, we think, has contended that no test
is known by which we can distinguish fossil human from
other fossil bones, of extinct species.* The question, to say
the least, is an open one, and no one can say that there are
not human fossils as old as those of the Mastodon and other
extinct species. The following extract we give from Dr.
Morton's memoir, as interesting in connection with the American type.
"It is necessary to advert to the discoveries of Dr. Lund among the
bone-caves of Minas Gerdas, in Brazil. This distinguished traveller
has found the remains of man in these caverns, associated with those of
extinct genera and species of animals; and the attendant circumstances
lead to the reasonable conclusion that they were contemporaneous inhabitants of the region in which they were found. Yet, even here, the
form of the skull differs in nothing from the acknowledged type, unless
it be in the still greater depression of the forehead, and a peculiarity of
form in the teeth. With respect to the latter, Dr. Lund describes the
incisors as having an oval surface, of which the axis is antero-posterior,
in place of the sharp and chisel-like edge of ordinary teeth of the
same class. He assures us that he found it equally in the young and
the aged, and is confident it is not the result of attrition, as is manifestly
the case in those Egyptian heads, in which Prof. Blumenbach noticed
an analogous peculiarity. I am not prepared to question an opinion
which I have not been able to test by personal observation; but it is obvious, that, if such differences exist, independently of art or accident, they
are at least specific, and consequently of the highest interest in Ethnology.
"The head of the celebrated Guadaloupe Skeleton forms no exception to the type of the race. The skeleton, itself, which is in a senmifossil state, is preserved in the British Museum, but wants the cranium;
which, however, is supposed to be recovered in the one found by M.
L'H6rminier, in Guadaloupe, and brought by him to Charleston, South
*Natural History of Human Species. Edinb. Ed., 1848, p. 93.