Indeed, some of the chief contrasts of the two continents arise not so much from geological unlikeness as from their unsymmetrical situation with respect to the equator, whereby the northern one lies mostly in the temperate zone, while the southern one lies mostly in the torrid zone.
If now the native Americans be compared with the races of the regions across the oceans to their east and west, it will be seen that their unlikeness is extreme to the races eastward of them, whether white Europeans or black Africans.
Most of these, however, fail to afford any useful points of comparison, either from their utter unlikeness to Homer, or because there is no evidence of the existence of anterior popular songs.
On the other hand, the mere unlikeness of any particular passage to the nine lines of the Hymn is obviously no reason for denying that it may have been by the same author.
The external unlikeness of the apes to man depends much on their hairiness, but this and some other characteristics have no great zoological value.
