Schoolcraft an obvious absurdity.

The Polar or Esquimaux race has been least known of all, and prior to the explorations of that true hero and true son of science, the late Dr. Kane, was scarcely known except in name. It is both Asiatic and American, but which continent is its birth-place is matter of doubt. The facilities for passing from one continent to the other were doubtless much greater at some former period than at present, and not only men but animals 48may have done so with ease. Except a few well-known species of animals and vegetables, which are essential to the well-being of the Caucasian, and which have accompanied him in all his migrations, each species has its own centre of existence, beyond or outside of which it is limited to a determinate existence. The Arctic animals are quite numerous, and differ widely from all others, but they are absolutely the same in Asia as in America, and therefore must have passed from one to the other, and man, however subordinate or inferior to other races endowed by nature with ample powers of locomotion and migration, could meet with only trifling obstacles in passing from one continent to the other. This race, though thus far of little or no importance, is doubtless superior to the Negro, for the necessities of its existence, the terrible struggle for very life in those bleak and desolate regions, infer the possession of powers superior to those of a race whose centre of life is in the fertile and luxuriant tropics, where nature produces spontaneously, and where the idle and sensual Negro only needs to gather these products to exist and multiply his kind.

48

Finally, we have the Negro—last and least, the lowest in the scale but possibly the first in the order of Creation, for there are many reasons in the nature and structure of things that indicate, if they do not altogether warrant, the inference that the Negro was first and the Caucasian latest in the programme or order of Creation. The typical, woolly-haired Negro may have been created in tropical Asia, and carried thence to Africa, as in modern times he has been carried to tropical America. Like other subordinate races, it never migrates, but the extensive traces of its former existence in Asia show beyond doubt that that was either its primal home, or that it had been carried there by the Caucasian long anterior to the historic era. But it is now found in its pure state or specific 49form in Africa alone, and even here large portions of it have undergone extensive adulteration. Our knowledge of Africa is very limited and consequently very imperfect. African travelers, explorers, missionaries, etc., 

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