the sources of this river; to determine the succession of its freshets; to define the origin and nature of the elements which they have brought down; to follow these elements from stage to stage, and thus discover the road which each of them has followed to its landing-place—in other words, to construct the history of the migrations of the different American peoples.
The accomplishment of this task will, as I have already said, present other and more difficulties in America than in Polynesia. Those who approach it will have recourse to nothing like the historical charts and the genealogies of which are composed the oral archives religiously preserved in all the islands of the Pacific. But modern science has resources of which we are gaining better and better comprehension of the power. Joining the data furnished by the study of the strata and their fossils, by comparative craniology, linguistics, and ethnography, we can enter on the mass of problems and foresee their solution. Serious efforts have been already made in this direction, and they have not been unfruitful. From this time we shall be able to indicate on the map a considerable number of itineraries, but they are so far partial and local. They are as yet no more than fragments, like those which Hale's predecessors could point to in Oceania.
The time may be long in coming, but let not Americanists lose heart. Every new discovery, of however little importance it may seem at first, will bring them nearer to the end. From year to year these fragments, now isolated and scattered, will join and be co-ordinated with one another; and some day the map of American migrations will be delineated, from Asia to Greenland and Cape Horn, as the map of Polynesian migrations has been drawn, from the Indian Archipelago to Easter Island, and from New Zealand to the Sandwich Islands.—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.
