Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Prehistoric Man, Vol. 1 of 2: Researches Into the Origin of Civilization in the Old and the New World
But it is altogether different with the New World which Columbus revealed. Superficial students Of its monuments have indeed misinterpreted intellectual char acteristics pertaining to the infantile instincts common to human thought into fancied analogies with the arts of Egypt and more than one ingenious philosopher has traced out affinities with the mythology and astronomi cal science of the ancient East but the western conti nent still stands a world apart, with a peculiar people, and with languages, arts, and customs essentially its own. To whatever source the American nations may be traced, they had remained shut in for unnumbered cen turies by ocean barriers from all the in?uences of the historic hemisphere. Yet there the first European ex plorers found man so little dissimilar to all with which they were already familiar, that the name of Indian originated in the belief, retained by the great cosmo grapher to the last, that the American continent was no new world, but only the eastern confines of Asia.
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