dea of the range of contrast, if we revert to the method of
Thucydides,[7] and compare the unexploited Europe of the days before
agriculture, with unexploited America at the time of its discovery by
Europeans. Here, within the same geographical limits of the north
temperate zone, and with the far simpler scheme of surface relief which
characterizes the New World, we have civilizations as different as those
of the Eskimo, the Algonkin peoples of the coniferous forests, the Huron
and Iroquois of the deciduous hardwoods, horticultural Muscogeans in the
south-east, buffalo-hunting Sioux on the prairie, predatory Apaches and
Blackfeet in the foothills, and littoral and riparian fisher-folk on the
Pacific slope: just as recognizable now, in their distributions and
overlaps, by the fashions of their pipe-bowls and other debris, as are
the representatives of the 'row-grave' culture or the makers of
'band-keramik' in Central Europe.

Keeping in mind this analogy of prehistoric Europe with pre-Columbian
North America, let us classify the problems of subsistence which these
Old World regions offered to prehistoric man; and consider, granting him
all the reason in the world, and uniform physique (if you please) as
well, how he is to formulate solutions which shall show any trace of
uniformity, and yet be solutions for him of the one Protean problem, how
to sustain life here and now?

Along the Arctic seaboard, homogeneous from Behring Strait nearly to the
North Cape, we have the frozen tundra region, with a characteristic
tundra culture; pushed now far north since Europe mellowed into a
habitable world, but formerly widespread about the skirts of the
shrinking ice-sheet. Here we hunt large animals and sea-shore beasts,
and trap small-deer very ingeniously; we fish in the large
northward-flowing rivers; and eventually (heaven knows after how long,
or how far back from now) we borrowed a notion, probably from pastorals
imprudently straying too far along those northward river-lanes through
the forests, and domesticated our best of beasts, the reindeer; stealing
a march here on our Alaskan cousins, who call them caribou and treat
them so: _they_ had no pastorals on the prairie southward to teach them
otherwise, and when the Russians came and brought reindeer over from
Asia, the silly fellows turned them loose and hunted them till they had
eaten them all.

South of the tundra, the Great Northern Woodland encircles the planet,
interru