The typical AMERICAN has straight black hair and dark eyes, his skin
exhibiting various shades of reddish or yellowish brown, sometimes
inclining to olive. The face is broad and scantily bearded; the skull
wide and high. Such people extend from Patagonia to Mexico, and much
farther north along the west coast. In the main a race of hunters,
they had nevertheless, at the time of the discovery of the Americas,
attained a remarkable degree of civilization in some localities. They
had domesticated ruminants, and not only practised agriculture,
but had learned the value of irrigation. They manufactured textile
fabrics, were masters of the potter's art, and knew how to erect
massive buildings of stone. They understood the working of the
precious, though not of the useful, metals; and had even attained to a
rude kind of hieroglyphic, or picture, writing.

The Americans not only employ the bow and arrow, but, like some
Amphinesians, the blow-pipe, as offensive weapons: but I am not aware
that the outrigger canoe has ever been observed among them.

I have reason to suspect that some of the Fuegian tribes differ
cranially from the typical Americans; and the Northern and Eastern
American tribes have longer skulls than their Southern compatriots.
But the ESQUIMAUX, who roam on the desolate and ice-bound coasts of
Arctic America, certainly present us with a new stock. The Esquimaux
(among whom the Greenlanders are included), in fact, though they
share the straight black hair of the proper Americans, are a duller
complexioned, shorter, and more squat people, and they have still
more prominent cheek-bones. But the circumstance which most completely
separates them from the typical Americans, is the form of their
skulls, which instead of being broad, high, and truncated behind, are