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ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED ON 
 
 
 Columbus Day, October 21, 1892 
 
 AT THE 
 
 Library and Museum Building 
 of the University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 
 
 BY 
 
 DANIEL G. BRINTON, A.M., M.D., LL.D., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN ARCHiEOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, 
 
 1892. 
 
ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED ON 
 
 Columbus Day, October 21, 1892, 
 
 AT THE 
 
 Library and Museum Building 
 of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 
 
 BY 
 
 DANIEL g5bRINT0N, A.M., M.D., LLD., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN ARCH.«:OLOGY AND LINGUISTICS 
 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. / 
 
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY 
 
 OF WASHINGTON, D. C. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, 
 1892. 
 
:?53 
 
Mr. Provost, Ladies and Gentlemen: — 
 
 In this epochal year, on this epochal day, we cele- 
 brate an event unparalleled in the annals of the race. 
 That event completed the knowledge of the Old, by 
 discovery of a New World ; it dispersed the dark- 
 ness of dogmatic philosophy by the clear light of 
 investigation and exploration ; it revealed to man 
 the fullness of his own nature by making him ac- 
 quainted for the first time with all the varieties of his 
 own species. 
 
 Others will tell you the thrilling and pathetic tale 
 of the greatness of that great and still misunder- 
 stood and calumniated man, who went forth to 
 search the lonely seas, derided by the learned, flouted- 
 by the ignorant, but full of infinite courage and un- 
 swerving faith, fixed in purpose "to sail beyond the 
 sunset and the baths of all the western stars," until 
 he should reach the lands unknown and shores un- 
 trodden which his prophetic soul discerned. 
 
 Let others tell of his reward, of the darkened cell 
 where he sat with manacled limbs, of the insults 
 heaped upon his children, of his neglected age, and 
 of the anxieties that hovered around his dying couch. 
 Of these, I say, let others speak, — those capable of 
 sympathizing with a grand nature battered and 
 broken by the storms of fate and the keener blasts 
 of ingratitude and jealousy. 
 
I would call your attention to those strange mil- 
 lions who, through the strong endeavor of this 
 famed commander, were brought into relation with 
 the rest of their kind, — isolated, unique example of 
 a race of our common species, cut off time out of 
 mind from all others, but preserving through those 
 thousands of years the unalterable imprint of Human- 
 ity. VVe know not whence they came, nor when. 
 Far back in those gloomy years when the ice sheet 
 covered the continent almost to the spot where now 
 we stand, there seem to have been some men in this 
 land batding with the elements for a hard subsistence. 
 Many believe that their imperfect weapons, mere bits 
 of broken stone, may yet be found in the gravels and 
 moraines of the ancient glaciers. Perhaps from 
 these descended that race which, with a surprising 
 uniformity of physical and mental traits, extended, 
 at the time of the discovery, from the shores of the 
 Arctic Sea on the north to the bleak rocks of Cape 
 Horn on the south. " Wherever you find its repre- 
 sentatives, you see the same peculiar hair, color, 
 eyes, and other physical signs of racial unity ; and 
 wherever you trace their history, you find the same 
 forms of religious and social life, the same lines of 
 culture-development, and that same ineradicable love 
 of liberty which seems to be inhaled with the air of 
 this New World, and to become a part of the 
 nature of men of whatever race who settle upon its 
 soil, an inspiration and a faculty divine, ever urging 
 them to wider horizons and a higher evolution. 
 
 Yet alongside of all these differences, sundering 
 
them sharply from all other men whatsoever, we find 
 such staggering similarities of thought, of story, of 
 industrial product, that many a learned man to-day 
 will tell you that they can be explained only by the 
 theory that explorers earlier than Columbus, naviga- 
 tors antedating the Norwegian mariners, had not 
 merely touched the coasts, but had penetrated deep 
 into the American continent, carrying with them the 
 arts and the philosophies, the religions and the gov- 
 ernments, of the Old World. They will point out to 
 you, as did the learned Humboldt, that the calendar 
 of the Aztecs is too close to that of the Thibetans to 
 suppose it could have come from any other source ; 
 or, as has been often advocated by names less known 
 to fame, that the signs of early Christian influence, 
 the marks of Buddhistic dogmas, the words of Aryan 
 languages, the alphabet of Chinese scribes, the traces 
 of Phenician culture, the fragments of Welsh dialects, 
 the proofs of Japanese intercourse, are all too clear to 
 permit of a doubt, but that from these sources the 
 American Indian owed whatever of civilization he 
 could boast of. 
 
 The learned writers who have filled portly volumes 
 in marshalino- such evidence have foraotten one 
 fact, — that, first of all, the native American was a 
 man, a man as we are men, with the same faculties 
 and aspirations, with like aims and ambitions, working 
 as our ancestors worked, endeavoring to carry out 
 similar plans with very similar means, fighting the 
 same foes, seeking the same allies, and consequently 
 arriving at the same or similar results. These 
 
writers have thus lost to view the greatest lesson of 
 all, that man, everywhere and at all times, separated 
 by trackless seas, shut up apart ever since glacial 
 ice froze the continents, dreaming of none others 
 than he sees around him and influenced by none, 
 develops in accordance with the laws of a common 
 nature, proves himself kith and kin fo all other men, 
 vindicates everywhere the words of that wise man 
 who, nigh nineteen hundred years ago, startled 
 the subtle and conceited sophists of Athens by 
 declaring, — " God has made of one blood all nations 
 of the earth." 
 
 This is the lesson, and the last and highest lesson, 
 which you will learn if you look around you in this 
 building-. What is the use of all these stranQ-e and 
 diverse objects ? Why bring together at much 
 labor and expense these broken stones, these weap- 
 ons of savages, these battered and nigh effaced 
 inscriptions, these bones and hideous remnants of 
 the buried dead,— why place them alongside of 
 carved scimitars, of gay porcelain, of the dreams of 
 beauty chiseled on glorious gems ? What means 
 this fantastic conglomeration of disparate material ? 
 
 I will tell you. Every object you see in these cases, 
 every fragment, every bit of dirty stone as well as 
 every gem, every torn scrap of mummy cloth as well 
 as every gaudy vase from the famed potteries of the 
 Orient, is a star — a star, shinincr throuoh the nio-ht of 
 time, illumining to our view the path, — the long, the 
 blind, the dreary, often the bloody path, — that man 
 
trod to reach these classic grounds and breathe this 
 peaceful air which are around us here to-day. 
 
 Is it not worth while to learn the paths our fathers 
 trod, to hear of their struggles, to sympathize in their 
 defeats, to share great joy at their victories ? Indeed 
 it is. These fraorments around us tell of contests 
 and crises which no history records ; they testify of 
 heroes greater than Agamemnon, of whom no Homer 
 has sung; they hint of tribes and nations who fought 
 and fell, and of whom not even the name is inscribed 
 on any tomb, but who marched breast forward, never 
 doubting right would triumph and their deeds bear 
 fruit in ages yet unborn. They were right ; and the 
 lesson of this miscellaneous mass, of this farrago of 
 stuff and lumber, of worn-out scraps and shards of 
 pots and pans, if you will read it aright, is that in the 
 endless chain of history.no link is useless, that from 
 the dark days when man, a naked savage, struggled 
 with weak powers against the elemental and mighty 
 forces of nature, up to to-day, when he has made 
 them his obedient servants, there are everywhere 
 marks of a master hand, guiding his steps in the 
 darkness, letting no life wholly go to waste, building 
 every fragment into an edifice which shall become 
 a temple, pursuing through all devious ways the 
 design of some unseen Destgner, ever blending, 
 guiding, developing, toward some future end which 
 we can dimly descry but dare not define. 
 
 This is the truth, — the elder truth, the sacred truth, 
 — which this Museum teaches, which is the object of 
 its construction, which it seeks by its thousands of 
 
8 
 
 evidences to corroborate and to disseminate. It is 
 an earnest and a living truth, which it behooves you 
 to take home and Hve intimately with ; for remember 
 this, that all you have in the present, all you enjoy, 
 all you can offer those you love, is the product and 
 the harvest of the past, of those ages of accumulating 
 knowledge and skill you see here represented ; and 
 remember this still more, that we are to future 
 generations what these ancient people were to us, 
 and that as we accept and delight in the extension 
 of knowledge, as we cherish and honor the past and 
 its lessons, as we love to gather the proofs of the 
 noble deeds of our fathers, so we shall transmit to 
 our children and our children's children, unto untold 
 generations, the aspirations that are ennobling and 
 the passions that are heroic. 
 
 

 
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