Chapter XIX: Appendix: No. I (5)

"The rattle is usually about half an inch in breadth, one quarter of an inch in thickness, and each joint about half an inch long. The joint consists of a number of little cases of a dry, horny substance, inclosed one within another; and not only the outermost of these little cases articulates with the outermost case of the contiguous joint, but each case, even to the smallest one of all, at the inside, is connected by a sort of joint with the corresponding case in the next joint of the rattle. The little cases or shells lie very loosely within one another, and the noise proceeds from their dry and hard coats striking one against the other. It is said that the animal joins a fresh joint to its rattle every year. Of this, however, I have great doubts; for the largest snakes are frequently found to have the fewest joints to their rattles. A medical gentleman in the neighborhood of Newmarket had a rattle in his possession which contained no less than thirty-two joints; yet the snake from which it was taken scarcely measured five feet. Rattlesnakes, however, of the same kind, and in the same part of the country, have been found of a greater length with not more than ten rattles."--Weld, p. 409.

"Man or animals bitten by the rattlesnake expire in extreme agony; the tongue swells to an enormous size, the blood turns black, and, all the extremities becoming cold, gangrene ensues, and is speedily succeeded by death. The remedies in common use are the _Polygala seneca_ or _Aristolochia serpentaria_, employed as a decoction. Sometimes scarification, or cauterizing the wound with a burning iron, if immediate in their application, is attended with success. The Indians' favorite remedy is sucking the wound, which in a slight bite is generally successful. Mr. Catesby, by traveling much among the Indians, had frequent opportunities of seeing the direful effects of the bite inflicted by these snakes. He seems to consider that the success of any remedy is owing more to the force of nature or to the slightness of the bite than to any other cause. He has known persons bitten to survive without assistance for many hours; but where a rattlesnake with full force penetrates with his deadly fangs into a vein or artery, inevitable death ensues, and that, as he has often seen, in less than two minutes. The Indians, for this reason, know their destiny directly they are bit, and when they perceive it is mortal, apply no remedy, concluding all efforts in vain. From experiments made in Carolina by Captain Hall, and related in the Philosophical Transactions, it appears that a rattlesnake of about four feet long, being fastened to a stake in the ground, bit three dogs, the first of which died in less than a quarter of a minute; the second, which was bitten a short time afterward, in about two hours, in convulsions; and the third, which was bitten about half an hour afterward, showed the visible effects of the poison in about three hours, and died likewise. Four days after this, another dog was bitten, which died in half a minute; and then another, which died in four minutes. A cat which was bitten was found dead the next day. The experiments having been discontinued some time, from want of subjects, a common black-snake was procured, which was healthy and vigorous, and about three feet long. It was brought to the rattlesnake, when they bit each other, the black-snake biting the rattlesnake so as to make it bleed. They were then separated, and in less than eight minutes the black-snake died, while the rattlesnake, on the contrary, showed no signs of indisposition, appearing as well as before. Lastly, in order to try whether the rattlesnake could poison itself, it was provoked to bite itself: the experiment succeeded, and the animal expired in less than twelve hours."--Rees's _Cyclopaedia_, art. Crotalus.

Charlevoix says that "La morsure du Serpent a Sonnettes est mortelle, si on n'y remedie sur-le-champ; mais la Providence y a pourvu. Dans tous les endroits, ou se rencontre ce dangereux reptile, il croit une plante a laquelle on a donne le nom d'Herbe a Serpent a Sonnettes (Bidens Canadensis) et dont la racine est un antidote sur contre le venin de cet animal.... Il est rare que le serpent a sonnettes attaque les passans qui ne lui cherchent point nuire. J'eu ai en un a mes pieds qui eut assurement plus de peur que moi, car je ne l'apercus que quand il fuyoit."--Charlevoix, vol. v., p. 235.

"Archdeacon Burnaby was told by a planter in Virginia that he had one day provoked a rattlesnake to such a degree as to make it strike a small vine which grew close by, and the vine presently drooped and died."--Burnaby's _Travels in North America_, in Pinkerton, vol. xiii., p. 724.

"The rattlesnake has two fangs, which are concealed in a sheath, one at each side of the upper jaw. They are curved in their shape, and their point is as sharp as that of a common needle. They are hollow in the center, and the roots of the fangs are connected with the poison bags. These reptiles generally use only one fang at a time, and when they do use it, they seize with their mouth the part which they intend to poison, then perforate it deeply with the fang. At this moment the bag contracts, and the deleterious fluid, which has such an enmity to the blood, is injected into the very bottom of the wound, through a small aperture in the under part of the fang, at a short distance from the sharp point. Having effected his purpose, he withdraws the instrument, and leaves his victim to his fate. He does not seem to feel pain at the moment, and generally for the first five minutes he appears to be perfectly well. At the end of this period, however, the ears begin to droop; he seems giddy and uneasy; the lower extremities soon lose their power; he falls on the ground; the pupils dilate; slight convulsions come on; and the animal dies, generally, in about fifteen minutes from the time that the poison had been injected into the wound. When we examine the part immediately after death, we find that the poison has completely destroyed the red color of the blood; and not only of this, but for two inches all round the puncture, the muscular fibers, and even the cellular substance, are as black as if they had been for hours in a state of complete mortification. When the muriate of soda (common salt) is immediately applied to the wound, it is a complete antidote. When an Indian is bitten by a snake, he applies a ligature above the part, and scarifies the wound to the very bottom; he then stuffs it with common salt, and after this it soon heals, without producing any effect on the general system. (The ligature may be the efficacious remedy, intercepting the current of blood to the heart, and consequently preventing the action of the poison upon that vital organ.) A rabbit, under the influence of the rattlesnake poison, has been seen to drink a saturated solution of muriate of soda and soon recover, while healthy rabbits would not taste a drop of the same saline water."--Stevens's _Observations on the Properties of the Blood_, p. 137, 315.

"I was with the Hon. Esquire Boyle when he made certain experiments of curing the bite of vipers with certain East India snake-stones, that were sent him by King James II., purposely to have him try their virtue and efficacy. For that end he got some brisk vipers, and made them bite certain pullets; he applied nothing to one of the pullets, and it died within three minutes and a half; but I think they all recovered to whom he applied the snake-stones, though they turned wonderful pale, their combs drooped immediately, and the next morning all their flesh was turned green to a wonder; nevertheless, they recovered by degrees."--_Miscellanea Curiosa_, vol. iii., p. 345.

No. XLI.

"It is an unquestionable fact, that the copper-colored man can not endure the spread of European civilization in his neighborhood, but perishes in its atmosphere, without suffering from ardent spirits, epidemics, or war, as if touched by a poisonous breath." Thus writes Mr. Poeppig, a German naturalist, who has resided for some years in South America; and he proceeds to compare the substitution of the one race for the other, with the destruction of the first growth of low vegetation in the recently-formed islands of the Pacific by the vigorous crop of forest trees which succeeds it.--_Encyclopaedia_ of Erz and Gruber, art. Indici.

Thus also writes the philosophical traveler, Mr. Darwin: "Besides several evident causes of destruction, there appears to be some more mysterious agency at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we shall find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer. The Polynesian of Malay extraction has, in parts of the East Indian Archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-colored native. The varieties of man seem to act upon each other in the same way as different species of animals, the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine, energetic natives saying, 'They knew the land was doomed to pass from their children.'"

Sir Richard Bourke writes thus to Lord Glenelg respecting New Zealand (1837): "Disease and death prevail even among those natives who, by their adherence to the missionaries, have received only benefit from the English connection, and even the very children, who are reared under the care of the missionaries, are swept off in a ratio which promises, at no very distant period, to leave the country destitute of a single aboriginal inhabitant. The natives are perfectly sensible of this decrease, and when they contrast their own condition with that of the English families, they conceive that the God of the English is removing the aboriginal inhabitants to make room for them; and it appears to me that this impression has produced among them a very general unhappiness and indifference to life."

Sir Francis Head justified the sweeping measures of removal[227] contemplated during his administration of Canada, by asserting his belief in the same mysterious certainty of the aboriginals' extirpation. "We may as well endeavor to make the setting sun stand still on the summit of the Rocky Mountains, as attempt to arrest the final extermination of the Indian race."--See Merivale's _Lectures on Colonization_, No. 19 (delivered before the University of Oxford in 1839, 1840, and 1841), in which he objects to the truth of the facts on which the above statements are founded, in so far as they are supposed to involve any mysterious influence of the white over the copper-colored races. "Perhaps I may venture to attribute some of the coloring (of the foregoing statements) to that taste for fanciful analogies, and speculations partaking of the mysterious, in which natural philosophers are apt to indulge when they apply their knowledge to subjects not immediately within their province. When we find one race of animals, or one class of vegetation, extirpating another, there is nothing inexplicable in the succession of cause and effect. The stronger destroys the weaker by natural agencies: animals become the prey of newly-imported indigenous ones, or their food is destroyed by the multiplication of the latter: the seeds of one class of vegetables can not spring where a stronger growth has established itself, and so forth. What is there in these or similar processes analogous to the supposed mysterious influence of the mere contact of one family of the human race upon another? If it be true that the mere presence of a white population is sufficient to cause the Red Indians or the Polynesians to dwindle and decay, without any assignable agency of the one or the other, it must be confessed that this is an anomaly in the laws of Providence utterly unexplained by all our previous knowledge, wholly at variance with all the other laws by which animal life and human society are governed."--Vol. ii., p. 206.

[Footnote 227: Three millions of fertile acres were to be resumed; several thousand Indians were persuaded to relinquish them, and migrate to a large island (Manitoulin) on Lake Huron. "The greatest kindness," says Sir F. Head, "which we can perform to these intelligent and simple-minded people, is to remove and fortify them as much as possible from all communication with the whites."--_Returns_, 1839, p. 145. These are nearly the same arguments which have uniformly been urged in the United States, and would justify incessant acts of arbitrary removal, such as would render all improvement impossible.]

No. XLII.

"The small-pox proves almost always fatal to the Red Indian, his hardened skin preventing the appearance of the eruption. In Abyssinia, where this dreadful disease is supposed to have originated, when any person is seized with it, the neighbors surround the house and set it on fire, consuming it with its miserable inhabitants. The American Indians regard the contagion with almost as much horror. The Mahas had been a powerful and warlike tribe till now, when they saw their strength wasted by a malady which they could neither resist nor prevent; they became frantic; they set fire to their village, and many of them killed their wives and children, to spare them the sufferings of disease, and that they might all go together to the land of souls."--Lewis and Clarke's _Travels to the Source of the Missouri_.

Lambert says, "Many nations have been totally exterminated by the small-pox. When I was in Canada in the spring of 1808, a village of Mississagas, residing near Kingston, was nearly depopulated by the small-pox; not more than twenty escaped of five hundred."

"Repeated efforts have been made, and so far, generally, as the tribes have ever had the disease (or, at all events, within the recollection of those who are now living in the tribes), the government agents (of the United States) have succeeded in introducing vaccination as a protection; but among the tribes in their wild state, who have not yet suffered from the disease, very little success has been met with in the attempt to protect them, on account of their superstitions, which have generally resisted all attempts to introduce vaccination. While I was on the Upper Missouri, several surgeons were sent into the country with the Indian agents, where I several times saw the attempt made without success. They have perfect confidence in the skill of their own physicians, until the disease has made one slaughter in their tribe, and then, having seen white men among them protected by it, they are disposed to receive it, before which they can not believe that so minute a puncture in the arm is going to protect them from so fatal a disease; and as they see white men so earnestly urging it, they decide that it must be some new trick of the pale faces, by which they are to gain some new advantage over them, and they stubbornly and successfully resist it."--Catlin, vol. ii., p. 258.

From the accounts brought to New York in the fall of 1838 by Messrs. M'Kenzie, Mitchell, and others, from the Upper Missouri, and with whom I conversed on the subject, it seems that in the summer of that year the small-pox was accidentally introduced among the Mandans by the fur traders, and that in the course of two months they all perished except some thirty or forty, who were taken as slaves by the Riccarees, an enemy living two hundred miles below them, and who worked up and took possession of their village soon after their calamity, taking up their residence in it, it being a better built village than their own; and from the lips of one of the traders who had more recently arrived from there, I had the following account of the remaining few, in whose destruction was the final termination of this interesting and once numerous tribe:

"'The Riccarees,' he said, 'had taken possession of the village after the disease had subsided, and, after living some months in it, were attacked by a large party of their enemies, the Sioux, and while fighting desperately in resistance, in which the Mandan prisoners had taken an active part, the latter had concerted a plan for their own destruction, which was effected by their simultaneously running through the pickets on to the prairie, calling out to the Sioux (both men and women) to kill them, "that they were Riccaree dogs, that their friends were all dead, and they did not wish to live;" that they here wielded their weapons as desperately as they could, to excite the fury of their enemy, and that they were thus cut to pieces and destroyed.'

"The accounts given by two or three white men, who were among the Mandans during the ravages of this frightful disease, are most appalling, and actually too heart-rending and disgusting to be recorded. The disease was introduced into the country by the Fur Company's steamer from St. Louis, which had two of their crew sick with the disease when it approached the Upper Missouri, and imprudently stopped to trade at the Mandan village, which was on the bank of the river, where the chiefs and others were allowed to come on board, by which means the disease got ashore.

"I am constrained to believe that the gentlemen in charge of the steamer did not believe it to be the small-pox; for if they had known it to be such, I can not conceive of such imprudence as regarded their own interests in the country, as well as the fate of these poor people, by allowing their boat to advance into the country under such circumstances.

"It seems that the Mandans were surrounded by several war parties of their more powerful enemies, the Sioux, at that unlucky time, and they could not, therefore, disperse upon the plains, by which many of them could have been saved; and they were necessarily inclosed within the pickets of the village, where the disease in a few days became so very malignant, that death ensued in a few hours after its attacks; and so slight were their hopes when they were attacked, that nearly half of them destroyed themselves with their knives, with their guns, and by dashing their brains out by leaping head foremost from a thirty-foot ledge of rocks in front of their village. The first symptom of the disease was a rapid swelling of the body, and so very virulent had it become, that very many died in two or three hours after their attack, and that in many cases without the appearance of the disease upon the skin. Utter dismay seemed to possess all classes and all ages, and they gave themselves up in despair as entirely lost. There was but one continual crying and howling, and praying to the Great Spirit for his protection, during the nights and days; and there being but few living, and those in too appalling despair, nobody thought of burying the dead, whose bodies, whole families together, were left in horrid and loathsome piles in their own wigwams, with a few buffalo robes, &c., thrown over them, there to decay, and be devoured by their own dogs. That such a proportion of their community as that above mentioned should have perished in so short a time, seems yet to the reader an unaccountable thing; but, in addition to the causes just mentioned, it must be borne in mind that this frightful disease is every where far more fatal among the native than in civilized population, which may be owing to some extraordinary susceptibility, or, I think, more probably, to the exposed lives they live, leading more directly to fatal consequences. In this, as in most of their diseases, they ignorantly and imprudently plunge into the coldest water while in the highest state of fever, and often die before they have the power to get out.

"Some have attributed the unexampled fatality of this disease among the Indians to the fact of their living entirely on animal food; but so important a subject for investigation I must leave for sounder judgments than mine to decide. They are a people whose constitutions and habits of life enable them most certainly to meet most of its ills with less dread, and with decidedly greater success, than they are met in civilized communities; and I would not dare to decide that their simple meat diet was the cause of their fatal exposure to one frightful disease, when I am decidedly of opinion that it has been the cause of their exemption and protection from another, almost equally destructive, and, like the former, of civilized introduction.

"During the season of the ravages of the Asiatic cholera, which swept over the greater part of the Western country and the Indian frontier, I was a traveler through those regions, and was able to witness its effects; and I learned from what I saw, as well as from what I have heard in other parts since that time, that it traveled to and over the frontiers, carrying dismay and death among the tribes on the borders in many cases, so far as they had adopted the civilized modes of life, with its dissipations, using vegetable food and salt; but wherever it came to the tribes living exclusively on meat, and that without the use of salt, its progress was suddenly stopped. I mention this as a subject which I looked upon as important to science, and therefore one on which I made careful inquiries; and, so far as I have learned, along that part of the frontier over which I have since passed, I have, to my satisfaction, ascertained that such became the utmost limits of this fatal disease in its travel to the west, unless where it might have followed some of the routes of the fur traders, who, of course, have introduced the modes of civilized life.

"From the trader who was present at the destruction of the Mandans I had many most wonderful incidents of this dreadful scene, but I dread to recite them. Among them, however, there is one that I must briefly describe, relative to the death of that noble _gentleman_, of whom I have already said so much, and to whom I became so much attached, _Mah-to-to-pa_, or 'the Four Bears.' This fine fellow sat in his wigwam and watched every one of his family die about him, his wives and his little children, after he had recovered from the disease himself, when he walked out round the village, and wept over the final destruction of his tribe; his braves and warriors, whose sinewy arms alone he could depend on for a continuance of their existence, all laid low; when he came back to his lodge, where he carried his whole family in a pile, with a number of robes, and wrapping another around himself, went out upon a hill at a little distance, where he laid several days, despite all the solicitations of the traders, resolved to _starve_ himself to death. He remained there till the sixth day, when he had just strength enough to creep back to the village, when he entered the horrid gloom of his own wigwam, and, laying his body alongside of the group of his family, drew his robe over him, and died on the ninth day of his fatal abstinence.

"So have perished the friendly and hospitable Mandans, from the best accounts I could get; and although it may be _possible_ that some few individuals may yet be remaining, I think it is not probable; and one thing is certain, even if such be the case, that, as a nation, the Mandans are extinct, having no longer an existence.

"There is yet a melancholy part of the tale to be told, relating to the ravages of this frightful disease in that country on the same occasion, as it spread to other contiguous tribes, to the Minatarrees, the Knisteneaux, the Blackfeet, the Chayennes, and Crows, among whom 25,000 perished in the course of four or five months, which most appalling facts I got from Major Pilcher, now Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, from Mr. M'Kenzie, and others."--Catlin's _American Indians_, vol. ii., p. 257.

No. XLIII.

"In man the coloring matter seems to be deposited in the dermoidal system by the roots or the bulbs of the hair,[228] and all sound observations prove that the skin varies in color from the action of external stimuli on individuals, and is not hereditary in the whole race. The Eskimoes of Greenland, and the Laplanders, are tanned by the influence of the air, but their children are born white. We will not decide on the changes which Nature may produce in a space of time, exceeding all historical traditions. Reason stops short in these matters when no longer under the guidance of experience and analogy. The nations that have a white skin begin their cosmogony by white men; according to them, the negroes and all tawny people have been blackened or embrowned by the excessive heat of the sun. This theory, adopted by the Greeks, though not without contradiction (Onesicritus apud Strabon, lib. xv., p. 983), has been propagated even to our own times. Buffon has repeated, in prose, what Theodectes had expressed in verse two thousand years before, 'that the nations wear the livery of the climate they inhabit.' If history had been written by black nations, they would have maintained what even Europeans have recently advanced (Prichard's _Researches into the Physical History of Man, 1813_), p. 233, 239, that man was originally black, or of a very tawny color, and that he has whitened in some races from the effect of civilization and progressive debilitation, as animals in a state of domestication pass from dark to lighter colors. I shall here cite the authority of Ulloa. This learned man has seen the Indians of Chili, of the Andes, of Peru, of the burning coasts of Panama, and those of Louisiana, situated under the northern temperate zone. He had the good fortune to live at a time when theories were less numerous, and, like me, he was struck at seeing the native under the line as much bronzed as brown, in the cold climate of the Cordilleras as in the plains. Where differences of color are observed, they depend on the race."--Humboldt's _Personal Narrative_, vol. iii., p. 298.

[Footnote 228: According to the interesting researches of Mr. Gaultier, on the _Organization of the Human Skin_, p. 57. John Hunter observes, that in several animals, the coloration of the hair is independent of that of the skin.

Blumenbach informs us how climate operates in modifying the color of the skin. He states that the proximate cause of the dark color of the integuments in an abundance of carbon, secreted by the skin with hydrogen, precipitated and fixed in the rete mucosum by the contact of the atmospheric oxygen.--_De Variet._, p. 124.

If Voltaire is to be believed, no well-informed person formerly passed by Leyden without seeing a part of the black membrane (the reticulum mucosum) of a negro, dissected by the celebrated Ruysell. Their error is, however, now universally admitted. The "rete mucosum" has been discovered to be nothing but the latest layer of epidermis, the inner surface of which is being continually renewed as the exterior is worn away, just like the bark of a tree. There is no distinct coloring layer, it appears, either in the fair or the dark-skinned races, the peculiar hue of the latter depending upon the presence of coloring matter in the cells of the epidermis itself. Color, therefore, is not even _skin deep_, for it does not reach the true skin, being entirely confined to the epidermis or scarf skin.]

No. XLIV.

"The Indian and the negro races, both fated, as it seems, to yield the supremacy to the _whites_, present in every other particular a curious contrast to each other. The red man appears to have received from nature every quality which contributes to greatness, except--I have no other word for it--_tamability_; he has shown in many remarkable instances intellectual capacity, talents for government, eloquence, energy, and self-command.... There is something noble and striking--something that commands respect and admiration, in the Indian character, irreconcilable though it be with advanced civilization and the operation of Christian influences. The negro, on the contrary, has precisely what the Indian wants; he is a domestic animal.... The Indian avoids his conqueror; the negro bows at his feet. The Indian loves the independence and privations of his solitude better than all the flesh-pots of Egypt; the negro, if left to himself, is helpless and miserable: he must have society and sensual pleasures; if he be allowed to eat and drink well, to dance, to sing, and to make love, he seems to have no further or higher aspirations, and to care nothing for the degradation of his race. With the single exception of Toussaint, I know no instance of a negro distinguishing himself in politics, or arms, or letters; and though I make every allowance for the difficulties and obstacles to his doing so which his situation imposes on him, I can not allow that these account for the fact that, notwithstanding the excellent education which many negroes receive, and the stimulus afforded by constant intercourse with whites, not one of them has yet, either here or in the West Indies, with the above-named exception, taken the lead among his countrymen, or made a name for himself. And this natural superiority of the Indian is, perhaps unconsciously, recognized and illustrated in a singular manner by the white man, in the different feelings which he exhibits upon the subject of amalgamation with the two races. Some of the best families in the United States are _proud_ to trace their origin to Indian chiefs (_e.g._, the Randolphs of Virginia boast that they came of the lineage of Powhatan); and I have myself met with half-breeds who were considered (and most justly) in every respect equal in estimation with full-blooded whites. It is needless to observe, that with respect to the negroes, the precise converse is the case. _Caeteris paribus_, we seem naturally to receive the red man as our equal."--Godley's _Letters from America_, vol. i., p. 153.

No. XLV.

"These islands were partly discovered by Behring in 1741, and the rest at several periods since his time. The most considerable of them amount to forty in number, and they may be justly considered as a branch of the Kamtskadale Mountains continued in the sea. The three small islands, known by the names of Attak, Shemya, and Semitshi, with a few others, were denominated by the Russians Aleutskie Ostrova, because a bold rock in the language of these parts is called 'Aleut.' In the sequel this name was extended to the whole chain, though a part of it is named the Andreanoffskoi, and the rest, lying further toward America, the Fox Islands. The survey of these islands, more anciently discovered by the Russians, and of the adjacent parts of the two continents, was made by Captain Cook in his third voyage, in 1778. If the Russians, then, can deservedly claim the priority of the discovery, no one can withhold from the adventurous and persevering Captain Cook the glory and the merit of having fixed the distance of the two continents and their respective extent, to the east for Asia, and to the west for North America."--Rees's _Cyclopaedia_, art. Aleutian Islands.

No. XLVI.

"Almost every where in the New World we recognize a multiplicity of forms and tenses in the verb, an artificial industry to indicate before-hand, either by inflection of the personal pronouns, which form the terminations of the verb, or by an intercalated _suffix_, the nature and the relation of its object and its subject, and to distinguish whether the object be animate or inanimate, of the masculine or the feminine gender, simple, or in complex number. This multiplicity characterizes the rudest American languages. Astarloa reckons, in like manner, in the grammatical system of the Biscayan, 206 forms of the verb. Strange conformity in the structure of languages among races of men so different, and on spots so distant.

"Those languages, the principal tendency of which is inflection, excite less the curiosity of the vulgar than those which seem formed by aggregation. In the first, the elements of which words are composed, and which are generally reduced to a few letters, are no longer distinguished. These elements, when isolated, exhibit no meaning; the whole is assimilated and mixed together. The American languages, on the contrary, are like complicated machines, the wheels of which are exposed. The artifice is visible--I mean the industrious mechanism of their construction. We seem to be present at their formation, and we should state them to be of very recent origin, if we did not recollect that the human mind follows imperturbably an impulse once given; that nations enlarge, improve, and repair the grammatical edifice of their language according to a plan already determined; finally, that there are countries where the languages of all the institutions and the arts have remained stereotyped, as it were, during the lapse of ages. The highest degree of intellectual development has been hitherto found among nations which belong to the Indian and Pelasgic branch. The languages, formed principally by aggregation, seem themselves to oppose obstacles to the improvement of the mind. They are, in fact, unfurnished with that rapid movement, that interior life, to which the inflection of the root is favorable, and which gives so many charms to works of the imagination. Let us not, however, forget that a people celebrated in the remotest antiquity, from whom the Greeks themselves borrowed knowledge, had perhaps a language, the construction of which recalls involuntarily that of the language of America. What a scaffolding of little monosyllabic and dissyllabic forms is added to the verb and to the substantive in the Coptic language!"--Humboldt's _Personal Narrative_, vol. iii., p. 273.

In his "Researches," Humboldt observes: "We find in the New Continent languages, some of which, as the Greenland, the Cora, the Tamanac, the Totonac, and the Quichua (_Archiv. fuer Ethnographie_, b. i., s. 345; Vaters, s. 206), display a richness of grammatical forms which we trace nowhere in the Old World, except at Congo, and among the Biscayans, who were the remains of the ancient Cantabrians. But, amid these marks of civilization (referring to the Aztec nation), and this progressive perfection of language, it is remarkable that no people of America had attained that analysis of sounds which leads to the most admirable, we might almost say the most miraculous of all inventions, an alphabet. We are led to think that the progressive perfection of symbolic signs, and the facility with which objects are painted, had prevented the introduction of letters ... _not_ the case in Egypt."

Chateaubriand says that the Jesuits have left important works relative to the language of the Canadian savage. Father Chaumont, who had lived fifty years among the Hurons, composed a grammar of their language. To Father Rasles, who spent ten years in an Abenakis village, we are indebted for valuable documents. A French and Iroquois dictionary--a new treasure for philologists--is finished. There is also a manuscript dictionary--Iroquois and English--but, unluckily, the first volume is lost.

"Les trois langues, Huronne, Algonquine et Siou sont les langues meres du Canada. Ils ont tous les caracteres des langues primitives, et il est certain qu'elles n'ont pas une origine commune. La seule prononciation suffisoit pour le pronom. Le Siou sifle en parlant, le Huron n'a point de lettre labiale, qu'il ne scanroit prononcer, parle du gosier et aspire presque toutes les syllabes; l'Algonquin prononce avec plus de douceur, et parle plus naturellement. Je n'ai pu rien apprendre de particulier de la premiere de ces trois langues; mais nos anciens missionnaires ont beaucoup travaille sur les deux autres, et sur les principales de leurs dialectes: voici ce que j'en ais oui dire aux plus habiles.

"La langue Huronne est d'une abondance, d'une energie, et d'une noblesse, qu'on ne trouve peut-etre reunies dans aucune des plus belles, que nous connoissons, et ceux, a qui elle est propre, quoiqu'ils ne soient plus qu'une poignee d'hommes, ont encore dans l'ame une elevation, qui s'accorde bien mieux avec la majeste de leur langage, qu'avec le triste etat, ou ils sont reduits. Quelques uns ont cru y trouver des rapports avec l'Hebreu; d'autres en plus grand nombre ont pretendu qu'elle avoit la meme origine que celle des Grecs; mais rien n'est plus frivole que les preuves, qu'ils en apportent. La langue Algonquine n'a pas autant de force, que la Huronne, mais elle a plus de douceur et d'elegance. Toutes deux ont une richesse d'expressions, une variete de tones, une propriete de termes, une regularite, qui etonnent: mais ce qui surprend encore davantage, c'est que parmi des Barbares qu'on ne voit point s'etudier a bien parler, et qui n'ont jamais eu l'usage de l'ecriture, il ne s'introduit point un mauvais mot, un terme impropre, une construction vicieuse, et que les enfans memes en conservent, jusque dans le discours familier, toute la purete. D'ailleurs, la maniere dont ils animent tout se qu'ils disent, ne laisse aucun lieu de douter qui ne comprennent toute la valeur de leur expressions, et toute la beaute de leur langue. Dans le Huron tout se conjugue; un certain artifice, que je ne vous expliquerois pas bien, y fait distinguer des verbes, les noms, les pronoms, les adverbes, &c. Les verbes simples ont une double conjugaison, l'une absolue, l'autre reciproque. Les troisiemes personnes ont les deux genres, car il n'y en a que deux dans ces langues; a scavoir, le genre noble, et le genre ignoble. Pour ce qui est des nombres et des tems, on y trouve les memes differences que dans le Grec. Par exemple, pour raconter un voyage, on s'exprime autrement si on la fait par terre, ou si on l'a fait par eau. Les verbes actifs se multiplient autant de fois, qu'il y a de choses, qui tombent sous leur action; comme le verbe, qui signifie _Manger_, varie autant de fois, qu'il y a de choses comestibles. L'action s'exprime autrement a l'egard d'une chose inanimee: ainsi _voir un homme_, et _voir une pierre_, ce sont deux verbes. Se servir d'une chose, qui appartient a celui qui s'en sert, ou a celui a qui on parle, ce sont autant de verbes differens.

"Il y a quelque chose de tout cela dans la langue Algonquine, mais la maniere n'en est pas la meme, et je ne suis nullement en etat de vous en instruire. Cependant, madame, si du peu, que je viens de vous dire, il s'ensuit que la richesse et la variete de ces langues les rendent extremement difficiles a apprendre, la disette et la sterilite ou elles sont tombees ne causent pas un moindre embarras. Car, comme les peuples, quand nous avons commence a les frequenter, ignoroient presque tout ce dont ils n'avoient pas l'usage, ou qui ne tomboit pas sous leurs sens, ils manquoient de termes pour les exprimer, ou les avoient laisse tomber dans l'oubli."--Charlevoix, tom. v., p. 288.

The variety of dialects proves the little communication held between the different tribes of savages, a necessary consequence of their living by the chase, and requiring extensive hunting-grounds.

"We need only," says Acosta (_De Procur. Indorum Salut._), "cross a valley for hearing another jargon."

No. XLVII.

"The following are the results of the most recent researches on the lines of fortifications, and the tumuli found between the Rocky Mountains and the chain of the Alleganies. The fortifications chiefly occupy the space between the great lakes of Canada, the Mississippi and the Ohio, from the fourty-fourth to the thirty-ninth degree of latitude. Those which advance most toward the northeast are on the Black River, one of the tributary streams of Lake Ontario. The most remarkable ancient fortifications in the State of Ohio are, 1st. Newark, a very regular octagon, containing an area of 32 acres, and connected with a circular circumvallation of 16 acres; the eight great doors of the octagon are defended by eight works placed before each opening. 2d. Perryvale County, numerous walls, not in clay, but stone. 3d. Marietta, two great squares with twelve doors; the walls of earth are 21 feet high, and 42 feet at their base. 4th. Circleville, a square with eight doors, and eight small works for their defense connected with a circular fort, surrounded by two walls and a moat. 5th. Point Creek, at the confluence of the Scioto and the Ohio; the fortifications are partly irregular; one of them contains 62 acres. 6th. Portsmouth, opposite Alexandria; vast ruins, disposed on parallel lines, denote that this spot heretofore contained a numerous population. 7th. Little Miami and Cincinnati, a wall of 7 feet high and 6300 toises long. All these square forts are placed as exactly to the east as the Egyptian and Mexican pyramids; when the forts have only one opening, it is directed toward the rising sun. The walls of these lines of fortification are most frequently of earth, but two miles from Chilicothe, in the State of Ohio, we find a wall constructed in stone, from 12 to 15 feet high, and from 5 to 8 feet thick, forming an inclosure of 80 acres. It is not yet precisely known how far those works extend to the west, along the course of the Missouri and the River La Plata; but they are not found on the north of the Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Michigan, neither do they pass the chain of the Alleganies. Some circumvallations discovered on the banks of the Chenango, near Oxford, in the State of New York, may be considered as a very remarkable exception. We must not confound these military monuments with the mounds or _tumuli_ containing thousands of skeletons of a stunted race of men, scarcely 5 feet high. These mounds increase in number from the north toward the south; Mr. Brackenridge thinks there are nearly 3000 tumuli, from 20 to 100 feet high, between the mouth of the Ohio, the Illinois, the Missouri, and the Rio San Francisco, and that the number of skeletons they contain indicate how considerable must have been the population heretofore of those countries. These monuments, considered as the places of sepulture of great communes, are most frequently situated at the confluence of rivers, and on the most favorable points for trade. The base of the tumuli is round, or of an oval form; they are generally of a conical form, and sometimes flattened at the summit, as if intended to serve for sacrifices, or other ceremonies to be seen by a great mass of people at once. Some of those monuments are two or three stories high, and resemble in their form the Mexican _Teocallis_, and the pyramids with steps of Egypt and Western Asia. Some of the tumuli are constructed of earth, and some of stones heaped together. Hatchets have been found on them, together with painted pottery, vases, and ornaments of brass, a little iron, silver in plates (near Marietta), and perhaps gold (near Chilicothe). Some of these mounds are only a few feet high, and are placed at the center or in the neighborhood of the circular circumvallations; they were either tribunes for haranguing the assembled people, or places of sacrifice, and where they are only from 20 to 25 feet high, they may be considered as observatories erected to discover the movements of a neighboring enemy. The great tumuli, from 80 to 100 feet high, are most frequently insulated, and sometimes seem to be of the same age as the fortifications to which they are linked. The latter merit particular attention: I know nowhere any thing that resembles them either in South America or the ancient continent. The regularity of the polygon and circular forms, and the small works intended to cover the doors of the building, are, above all, remarkable. We know not whether they were inclosures of property, walls of defense against enemies, or intrenched camps, as in Central Asia. The custom of separating the different quarters of a town by circumvallations is observed alike in the ancient Tenochleitian and the Peruvian town of Chimu, the ruins of which I examined, between Truxillo and the coast of the South Sea. The _tumuli_ are less characteristic constructions, and may have belonged to nations who had no communication with one another; they cover both Americas, the north of Asia, and the whole east of Europe, and, it is said, are still constructed by the Omawhaws of the River Plata. The skulls contained in the _tumuli_ of the United States furnish means of recognizing, almost with certainty, to what degree the race of men by whom they were raised differ from the Indians who now inhabit the same countries. Mr. Mitchell believes that the skeletons of the caverns of Kentucky and Tennessee 'belong to the Malays, who came by the Pacific Ocean to the western coast of America, and were destroyed by the ancestors of the present Indians, and who were of Tartar race (Mongul).' With respect to the tumuli and the fortifications, the same learned writer supposes, with Mr. De Witt Clinton, that those monuments are the works of Scandinavian nations, who, from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, visited the coast of Greenland, Newfoundland, or Vinland, or Drageo, and a part of the continent of North America. If this hypothesis be well founded, the skulls found in the _tumuli_ ought to belong, not to the American, Mongul, or Malay race, but to a race vulgarly called Caucasian.... Did the nations of the Mexican race, in their migrations to the south, send colonies toward the east, or do the monuments of the United States pertain to the Autochthone nations? Perhaps we must admit in North America, as in the ancient world, the simultaneous existence of several centers of civilization, of which the mutual relations are not known in history. The very civilized nations of New Spain, the Tolteques, the Azteques, and the Chichimeques, pretended to have issued successively, from the sixth to the twelfth century, from three neighboring countries situated toward the north. These nations spoke the same language, they had the same cosmogonic fables, the same propensity for the sacerdotal congregations, the same hieroglyphic paintings, the same divisions of time, the same taste (Chinese and Japanese) for noting and registering every thing. The names given by them to the towns built in the country of Analmae; were those of the towns they had abandoned in their ancient country. The civilization on the Mexican table-land was regarded by the inhabitants themselves as the copy of something which had existed elsewhere, as the reflection of the primitive civilization of Aztlan. Where, it may be asked, must be placed that parent land of the colonies of Anahuac, that _officinum gentium_ which, during five centuries, sends nations toward the south who understand each other without difficulty, and recognize each other for relations? Asia, north of Amour, where it is nearest America, is a barbarous country, and in supposing (which is geographically possible) a migration of southern Asiatics by Japan, Tarakay (Tchoka), the Kurile and Aleutian Isles, from southwest toward the northeast (from 40 to 55 degrees of latitude), how can it be believed that in so long a migration, on a way so easily intercepted, the remembrance of the institutions of the parent country could have been preserved with so much force and clearness? The cosmogonic fables, the pyramidal constructions, the system of the calendar, the animals of the tropics found in the catasterim of days, the convents and congregations of priests, the taste for statistic enumerations, the annals of the empire held in the most scrupulous order, lead us toward Oriental Asia, while the lively remembrances of which we have just spoken, and the peculiar physiognomy which Mexican civilization presents in so many other respects, seem to indicate the antique existence of an empire in the north of America, between the thirty-sixth and forty-second degrees of latitude. We can not reflect on the military monuments of the United States without recollecting the first country of the civilized nations of Mexico. It is in rising to more general historical considerations, in examining with more care than has been hitherto done the languages and the osteologic conformation of different tribes, in exploring the immense country bounded by the Alleganies and the coast of the Western Ocean, that means will be obtained of throwing light on a problem so worthy of exercising the sagacity of historians.... According to the traditions collected by Mr. Heckewelder, the country east of the Mississippi was heretofore inhabited by a powerful nation, of gigantic stature, called Alleghewi, and which gave its name to the Alleganian mountains. The Alleghewis were more civilized than any of the other tribes found in the northern climates by the Europeans of the sixteenth century. They inhabitated towns founded on the banks of the Mississippi, and the fortifications that now excite the astonishment of travelers were constructed by them, in order to defend themselves against the Delawares, who came from the west, and were allied at that period with the Iroquois. It may be supposed that this invasion of a barbarous people changed the political and moral state of those countries. The Alleghewis were vanquished by the Delawares after a long struggle. In their flight toward the south they gathered together the bones of their relations in separate _tumuli_; they descended the Mississippi, and what became of them is not known.... The lines of fortification of a prodigious length observed by Captain Lewis on the banks of the Missouri sufficiently prove that the ancient habitation of the Alleghewis, that powerful people which I am inclined to regard as being of Tolteque or Azteque race, extended far to the west of the Mississippi, toward the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Mr. Nuttall, in going up the Arkansas to Cadron, was informed of the existence of an ancient intrenchment, resembling a triangular fort. The Arkansas assert that it is the work of a _white_ and civilized people, whom, when they arrived in this country, their ancestors fought and vanquished, not by force, but cunning. They attribute, also, to a more ancient and polished people than themselves, the monuments of rough stones heaped up on the summit of the hills. Other monuments, not less curious, are the commodious roads of immense length which the natives have traced from time immemorial, and which lead from the banks of the Arkansas, near Little Rock, to Saint Louis on the right, and by the settlement of Mont Prairie, as far as Natchitoches, on the left. Do the characteristic features of colossal stature and _white_ color, attributed to nations now destroyed, owe their origin to the ideas of power and physical force in general, to the feeling of the intellectual preponderance of the Europeans, or are those features linked with the fables of white men, legislators, and priests, which we find among the Mexicans, the inhabitants of New Granada, and so many other American nations? The skeletons contained in the _tumuli_ of the trans-Alleganian country belong, for the most part, to a stunted race of men, of lower stature than the Indians of Canada and the Missouri.

"An idol discovered at Natchez has been justly compared by M. Malte-Brun to the images of celestial spirits found by Pallas among the Mongul nations. If the tribes who inhabit the towns on the banks of the Mississippi issued from the same country of Aztlan, it must be admitted that the Tolteques, the Chichimeques, and the Azteques, from the inspection of their idols, and their essays in sculpture, were much less advanced in the arts than the Mexican tribes, who, without deviating toward the east, have followed the great path of the nations of the New World, directed from north to south, from the banks of the Gila toward the Lake of Nicaragua."--Humboldt's _Personal Narrative_, vol. vi., p. 328.

No. XLVIII.

"Dr. Morton, in his luminous and philosophical essay on the aboriginal race of America, seems to have proved that all the different tribes, except the Eskimaux, are of one race, and that this race is peculiar and distinct from all others. The physical characteristics of the Fuegians, the Indians of the tropical plains, those of the Rocky Mountains, and of the great Valley of the Mississippi, are the same, not only in regard to feature and external lineaments, but also in osteological structure. After comparing nearly 400 crania, derived from tribes inhabiting almost every region of both Americas, Dr. Morton has found the same peculiar shape pervading all; 'the square or rounded head, the flattened or vertical occiput, the high cheek bones, the ponderous maxillae, the large quadrangular orbits, and the low, receding forehead.' The oldest skulls from the cemeteries of Peru, the tombs of Mexico, or the mounds of the Mississippi and Ohio, agree with each other, and are of the same type as the heads of the most savage existing tribes."--Lyell, vol. ii., p. 37.

No. XLIX.