the appearance of one linguistic stock, the so-called Athapascan, away up in the north-west by the Alaska boundary; at one or two points in south-western Oregon and north-western California, where an absolute medley of languages prevails; and again in the southern highlands along the line of Colorado and Utah to the other side of the Mexican frontier.  Does it follow from this distribution that the Apaches, at the southern end of the range, have come down from Alaska, by way of the Rockies and the Pacific slope, to their present habitat?  It might be so in this particular case; but there are also those who think that the signs in general point to a northward dispersal of tribes, who before had been driven south by a period of glaciation.  Thus the first thing to be settled is the antiquity of the American type of man.

A glance at South America must suffice.  Geographically it consists of three regions.  Westwards we have the Pacific line of bracing highlands, running down from Mexico as far as Chile, the home of two or more cultures of a rather high order.  Then to the east there is the steaming equatorial forest, first covering a fan of rivers, then rising up into healthier hill-country, the whole in its wild state hampering to human enterprise.  And below it occurs the grassland of the pampas, only needing the horse to bring out the powers of its native occupants.

Before leaving this subject of the domesticated horse, of which so much use has already been made in order to illustrate how geographic opportunity and human contrivance must help each other out, it is worth noticing how an invention can quickly revolutionize even that cultural life of the ruder races which is usually supposed to be quite hide-bound by immemorial custom.  When the Europeans first broke in upon the redskins of North America, they found them a people of hunters and fishers, it is true, but with agriculture as a second string everywhere east of the Mississippi as well as to the south, and on the whole sedentary, with villages scattered far apart; so that in pre-Conquest days they would seem to have been enjoying a large measure of security and peace.  The coming of the whites soon crowded them back upon themselves, disarranging the old boundaries.  At the same time the horse and the gun were introduced.  With extraordinary rapidity the Indian adapted himself to a new mode of existence, a grassland life, complicated by the fact that the relentless pressure of the invaders gave it a predatory turn which it might otherwise have lacked.  Something very similar, though neither conditions nor consequences were quite the same, occurred in the pampas of South America, where horse-Indians like the Patagonians, who seem at first sight the indigenous outcrop of the very soil, are really the recent by-product of an intrusive culture.

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