human
Force and Nature,
gpt
In order to sustain this position, I might, were it admissible, adduce here, as collateral proof, an important and hitherto unpublished fact, of an archæological character, in addition to my geographical and geological observations made upon the coasts and islands of the Pacific Ocean. The fact is this, brought to my knowledge by an unusually extensive practice of my profession, that a uniform custom of _dorsocision_ has existed throughout the Polynesian islands from periods unknown, and beyond all tradition, embracing alike New Zealand, Esther Island, Tahiti, the Marquesas, and Hawaii--a rite wholly different from, but similar in its results to, the Jewish one of circumcision; and that this has been performed at the eighth or ninth year in all of them, and transmitted by father to son, with undeviating precision, from generation to generation. A fact of this character so deeply rooted in the moral, social, and traditional life of many peoples thus widely distributed throughout that vast ocean, so remotely separated from each other, and without intercourse, indicates even more strongly than colour, caste or language, not only the unity of their progenitors, but also the wide-spread existence of a single race, the vestiges of which were left here and there above the waters when the land sank between America and Asia, and received the older seas into a new basin.
human
Old World, and especially of the _miocene_ division of the tertiary formations, migrated to America, or _vice versa_. Heer, the celebrated Swiss naturalist, favours the Atlantic route, and regards certain important relations between the fauna of the continents of Europe and America as corroborative, to some extent, at least, of the truth of the statement of the Egyptian priests to Plato, that there, at one time, existed a continent named Atlantis, in the midst of the space now occupied by the Atlantic ocean. Sir Charles Lyell, however, on geological grounds, dissents from this view, and rather inclines to the one propounded by Dr. Asa Gray and Mr. Bentham, that the route of the migration was in the opposite or Pacific direction,
gpt
Lyell says,--
human
It is the enormous depth and width of the Atlantic which makes us shrink from the hypothesis of a migration of plants, fitted for a sub-tropical climate in the Upper Miocene period, from America to Europe, by a direct course from west to east. Can we not escape from this difficulty by adopting the theory that the forms of vegetation common to recent America and Miocene Europe, first extended from east to west across North America and passed thence by Behring's Straits and the Aleutian Islands to Kamtschatka, and thence by land, placed between the 40th and 60th parallels of latitude where the Kurile Islands and Japan are now situated, and thence to China, from which they made their way across Asia to Europe?