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                E T H N O G R A P H I C   S T U D I E S




                       _Printed by R. & R. Clark_
                                  FOR
                        DAVID DOUGLAS, EDINBURGH




                   T H E   L O S T   A T L A N T I S

                               AND  OTHER

                         ETHNOGRAPHIC  STUDIES

                                   BY
                 SIR  DANIEL  WILSON,  LL.D.,  F.R.S.E.
                 PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
             AUTHOR OF ‘THE PREHISTORIC ANNALS OF SCOTLAND’
        ‘PREHISTORIC MAN: THE ORIGIN OF CIVILISATION,’ ETC. ETC.

                               NEW  YORK
                          MACMILLAN  AND  CO.
                                  1892

                         _All rights reserved_




                             P R E F A C E

“THE Preface is the most troublesome part of a book,” I have often heard
my dear Father say; and now it falls to my unaccustomed pen to write a
preface for him.

I cannot undertake to define the aim of this book; I can only tell how
the last work on it was done. In my Father’s note-book I find it
described as “A few carefully studied monographs, linked together by a
slender thread of ethnographic relationship.”

Returning in June last from a brief visit to Montreal, with the first
signs of illness beginning to show, he found a bundle of proofs waiting
for him, and with the characteristic promptness which never let any duty
wait, he set to work at once to correct them. “It is my last book,” he
said, conscious that his busy brain had nearly fulfilled all its tasks;
and so through days of rapidly increasing weakness and pain he lay on
the sofa correcting proofs till the pen dropped from the hand no longer
able to hold it. His mind turned to the book in his _wandering_ thoughts
from illness, and on one of these occasions he murmured: “Sybil will
write the Preface”; and so I try to fulfil his wish. “Ask Mr. Douglas to
correct the proofs himself, and to be sure to make an index,” was one of
his last requests, thus providing for the finishing of the work which he
could not himself finish. He has passed now from this world whose
prehistoric story he so lovingly tried to decipher, and where he was
ever finding traces of the hand of God, into that other world, “where
toil shall cease and rest begin”; but where I doubt not he still goes on
learning more and more, no longer seeing through a glass darkly but in
perfect light.

The silent lips seem to speak once more in this volume—his last words
to the public; and I commit it very tenderly to those who are interested
in his favourite study of Ethnology.

                                                          SYBIL WILSON.
 BENCOSIE, TORONTO,
   _August 1892_.




                            C O N T E N T S

                                                                PAGE
      1.    THE LOST ATLANTIS                                      1

      2.    THE VINLAND OF THE NORTHMEN                           37

      3.    TRADE AND COMMERCE IN THE STONE AGE                   81

      4.    PRE-ARYAN AMERICAN MAN                               130

      5.    THE ÆSTHETIC FACULTY IN ABORIGINAL RACES             185

      6.    THE HURON-IROQUOIS; A TYPICAL RACE                   246

      7.    HYBRIDITY AND HEREDITY                               307

      8.    RELATIVE RACIAL BRAIN-WEIGHT AND SIZE                339


      INDEX                                                      403




                           THE LOST ATLANTIS
                                    I
                               EARLY IDEAS


THE legend of Atlantis, an island-continent lying in the Atlantic Ocean
over against the Pillars of Hercules, which, after being long the seat
of a powerful empire, was engulfed in the sea, has been made the basis
of many extravagant speculations; and anew awakens keenest interest with
the revolving centuries. The 12th of October 1892 has been proclaimed a
World’s holiday, to celebrate its accomplished cycle of four centuries
since Columbus set foot on the shores of the West. The voyage has been
characterised as the most memorable in the annals of our race; and the
century thus completed is richer than all before it in the
transformations that the birth of time has disclosed since the wedding
of the New World to the Old. The story of the Lost Atlantis is recorded
in the _Timæus_ and, with many fanciful amplifications, in the _Critias_
of Plato. According to the dialogues, as reproduced there, Critias
repeats to Socrates a story told him by his grandfather, then an old man
of ninety, when he himself was not more than ten years of age. According
to this narrative, Solon visited the city of Sais, at the head of the
Egyptian delta, and there learned from the priests of the ancient empire
of Atlantis, and of its overthrow by a convulsion of nature. “No one,”
says Professor Jowett, in his critical edition of _The Dialogues of
Plato_, “knew better than Plato how to invent ‘a noble lie’”; and he,
unhesitatingly, pronounces the whole narrative a fabrication. “The
world, like a child, has readily, and for the most part, unhesitatingly
accepted the tale of the Island of Atlantis.” To the critical editor,
this reception furnishes only an illustration of popular credulity,
showing how the chance word of a poet or