This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1917 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXXII CONCEPTION OF NATIONALITY OF UNITED STATES GREATLY ENLARGED--IMPORTANCE OF ABORIGINAL AMERICA--VARIOUS LECTURES AND ADDRESSES--PUBLICATION OF VOLUME ON CRITICAL PERIOD--PERPLEXITIES OVER HIS GREAT TASK--RELIEVED BY HIS PUBLISHERS I887-1888 F1ske returned from his trip to the Pacific Coast with a greatly enlarged conception of the United States as a nation, and its place in the international world. Hitherto his personal knowledge of its physical features and of its people had been confined to the section of country east of the Mississippi River. By this trip he was brought to a vivid realization that not one half of its territory or of its natural resources, and but little of its scenic beauty, had been revealed to him. The development in his own day of a high degree of social and political order--of States with republican constitutions--out of the rapid influx of emigrants into the new territory, of various races, nationalities, and languages, a commingling of peoples to such an extent as to bring the Oriental and the Occidental civilizations face to face, could not but give a fresh impulse to his desire fully to set forth the fundamental principles underlying this Aboriginal America marvellous evolution of a great nation with its accompanying political and social phenomena, as well as to trace out the genesis and development of these principles: "to set forth and illustrate some of the chief causes which have shifted the world"s political centre of gravity from the Mediterranean and the Rhine to the Atlantic and the Pacific: from the men who spoke Latin to the men who speak English." Then, too, he was impressed as never before with the importance to his theme of setting forth the results of ethnologic researches regarding aboriginal, prehisto...