It is only in the westernmost parts of their area that the Amphinesian nations know anything about bows and arrows as weapons, or are acquainted with the use of metals or with pottery.  Everywhere they cultivate the ground, construct houses, and skilfully build and manage outrigger, or double, canoes; while, almost everywhere, they use some kind of fabric for clothing.

Between Easter Island, or the Sandwich Islands, and any part of the American coast is a much wider interval than that between Tasmania and New Zealand, but the ethnological interval between the American and the Polynesian is less than that between either of the previously named stocks.

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 eminently long, usually low, and prolonged backwards.

These Hyperborean people clothe themselves in skins, know nothing of pottery, and hardly anything of metals.  Dependent for existence upon the produce of the chase, the seal and the whale are to them what the cocoa-nut tree and the plantain are to the savages of more genial climates.  Not only are those animals meat and raiment, but they are canoes, sledges, weapons, tools, windows, and fire; while they support the dog, who is the indispensable ally and beast of burden of the Esquimaux.