r beyond question that these
systems prevail and are identical every where from Patagonia to the
Arctic Zone, his argument will have great force. But this has not yet
been shown. He says: "The Indian nations, from the Atlantic to the Rocky
Mountains, and from the Arctic Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, with the
exception of the Esquimaux, have the same system. It is elaborate and
complicated in its general form and details; and, while deviations from
uniformity occur in the systems of different stocks, the radical
features are, in the main, constant. This identity in the essential
characteristics of a system so remarkable tends to show that it must
have been transmitted with the blood to each stock from a common
original source. It affords the strongest evidence yet obtained of unity
in origin of the Indian nations within the region defined."

But unity in race among wild Indians found within the region specified
would be sufficiently manifest without this evidence. That the same
system of consanguinity and affinity, with precisely the same features
of identity, ever was extended over the whole continent, remains
unproved. The supposed traces of it among the Pueblos are by no means
clear. A more complete and accurate research is required to show that
identically the same system ever has existed any where between the
United States and Patagonia. A system not wholly unlike it, though not
the same, might grow up any where in widely separated tribal communities
of barbarous peoples, without doing any thing more than the tribal
system itself to show a common origin in race.

The aborigines of America may have been originally all of the same race.
There are some considerations in favor of this hypothesis which have
been used by writers entitled to great respect; but it can not yet be
claimed with reason that they have been able to settle this question
beyond the reach of doubt, even in their own minds. Therefore, to speak
moderately, it would be premature to assume that the Mound-Builders were
even remotely of the same race with the wild Indians, from whom they
were so different in all we know of them.

The attempt to establish this hypothesis of identity in race has given
rise to a tendency to underrate the development of the ancient people of
Mexico and Central America, and to lower the estimate of their
attainments sufficiently to bring them within reach of close
relationship to the wild Indians. The difficulty being reduced i