An inquiry into the origin of the antiquities of America / By John Delafield, Jr. With an appendix, containing notes, and 'A view of the causes of the superiority of the men of the Northern over those of the Southern Hemisphere', by James Lakey.
- John Delafield
- Date:
- 1839
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: An inquiry into the origin of the antiquities of America / By John Delafield, Jr. With an appendix, containing notes, and 'A view of the causes of the superiority of the men of the Northern over those of the Southern Hemisphere', by James Lakey. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![more than 10,000 feet, lichens and all the stunted vegetation of the polar regions; while on the other side, at an elevation of nearly 16,000 feet, we had corn-fields and large forest trees, and all the productions of the temperate regions of the earth. *********** In his opinion, the courses of rivers and of extensive forests, as well as of high ranges of mountainous tracts were to be taken into account, as influencing most materially the climate of circumjacent territories. — Sir David Brewster's Speech before the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The gentleness of courtship, or rather the first proof of affection, among the savages of New South Wales, consists in watching the beloved fair one of another tribe to her retirement, and then knocking her down with repeated blows of a club or wooden sword. After which impressive and elegant embrace, the matrimonial victim is dragged, streaming in her blood, to the lover’s party, and obliged to acknowledge herself his wife. Cannibalism, in times of war, is still common to several of the islands; [of the South Sea,] human immolation to most of them. ****** * * * * * * * It is also probable that Australia has in like manner been peopled by successive waves of rovers from both these continents; [Asia and Africa,] for we trace proofs of both sources, sometimes separate and sometimes mixed. But the theories that have been offered upon this subject are too numerous, and for the most part too fanciful for a minute detail, and belong rather to the geographer than to the physiologist. * * * * * * * Thus the gigantic height of the Patagonian has been adverted to as a very prominent feature; the pigmy form of the Esquimaux; and the still more pigmy form of the Himos of Madagascar, if any reliance may be placed on the testimony of Commerson, now that it has been corroborated by Modave, and still more lately by the Abbe de Rochon; the curved leg of the Calmuc race; the long leg of the Indian; and the high calf and flat foot of the Ethiopian. But it appears to me that all such distinctions are upon too narrow a scale, and perhaps too much dependent upon particular circumstances, for admission into the lines of a broad and original demarcation. — Dr. Good. The southern extremity of Africa, separated from the northern temperate zone by the intervention of the tropical regions, presents an animal creation of a peculiar character. * * * * * jn like manner, and for the same reason, the corresponding part of the American continent forms a separate zoological province. New-Holland possesses several entire genera of quadrupeds, which have been discovered in no other part of the world, and more than forty species of the marsupial tribe, which is exceedingly rare elsewhere. This law of limitation to particular localities might be shown to prevail not less rigidly in respect to other classes of animals, even to those of fishes and birds, which seem at first glance to be almost unconfined in their range of sea and air. Thus it is well known that the whales which are met with in the South Sea are distinct from those of the north; the same dissimilarity has been found in all other marine animals of the same class, so far as they have been examined; and it has been asserted by naturalists, who had spent years in collecting many thousand species of marine animals in the southern hemisphere, that there is not a single animal of the southern regions, from the sponges and the medusea to the testacea, which is not distinguished by essential characters from the analogous species in the northern seas. ***************](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b30455662_0183.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
