the
essential thing to notice is that they were _all of one blood_. Thus
their descendants, however different they may {5} have become in language
and customs, constitute one stock, which we call the _American Race_.
The peoples who reared the great earth-mounds of the Middle West, those
who carved the curious sculptures of Central America, those who built the
cave-dwellings of Arizona, those who piled stone upon stone in the quaint
pueblos of New Mexico, those who drove Ponce de Leon away from the shores
of Florida, and those who greeted the Pilgrims with, "Welcome,
Englishmen!"--all these, beyond a doubt, were of one widely varying race.

To this oneness of all native Americans there is, perhaps, a single
exception. Some writers look upon the Eskimo as a remnant of an ancient
European race, known as the "Cave-men" because their remains are found in
caves in Western Europe, always associated with the bones of arctic
animals, such as the reindeer, the arctic fox, and the musk-sheep. From
this fact it seems that these primitive men found their only congenial
habitation amid ice and snow. Now, the Eskimo are distinctly an arctic
race, and in other particulars they are amazingly like these men of the
caves who dwelt in Western Europe when it had a climate like that of
Greenland. The lamented {6} Dr. John Fiske puts the case thus strongly:
"The stone arrow-heads, the sewing-needles, the necklaces and amulets of
cut teeth, and the daggers made from antler, used by the Eskimos,
resemble so minutely the implements of the Cave-men, that if recent
Eskimo remains were to be put into the Pleistocene caves of France and
England, they would be indistinguishable in appearance from the remains
of the Cave-men which are now found there."

Further, these ancient men had an astonishing talent for delineating
animals and hunting scenes. In the caves of France have been found
carvings on bone and ivory, probably many tens of thousands of years old,
which represent in the most life-like manner mammoths, cave-bears, and
other animals now extinct. Strangely enough, of all existing savage
peoples the Eskimo alone possess the same faculty. These circumstances
make it probable that they are a remnant of the otherwise extinct
Cave-men. If this is so, their ancestors probably passed over to this
continent by a land-connection then existing between Northern Europe and
Northern America, of which Greenland is a survival.

From the Eskimo