Chapter VII: Hybridity and Heredity

FOUR centuries have now completed their course since the discovery of America revealed to Europe an indigenous people, distinct in many respects from all the races of the Old World. There, as in the older historic areas, man is indeed seen in various stages: from the rudest condition of savage life, without any knowledge of metallurgy, and subsisting solely by the chase, to the comparatively civilised nations of Mexico, Central America, and Peru, familiar with some of the most important arts, skilled in agriculture, and with a system of writing embodying the essential germs of intellectual progress.

The western hemisphere, which was the arena of such ethnical development, had lain, for unnumbered centuries, apart from Asia and Europe; and so its various nationalities and races were left to work out their own destinies, and to develop in their own way whatever inherent capacities for progress pertained to them. But this done, it was abruptly brought into intimate relations with Europe by the maritime discoveries which marked the closing years of the fifteenth century.

From that date a constant transfer of races from the Old to the New World has been taking place, alike by voluntary and enforced migration; with results involving a series of undesigned yet exhaustive ethnological experiments carried out on the grandest scale. There alike has been tested to what extent the European and the African are affected by migration to new regions, and by admixture with diverse races. There can now be witnessed the results of a transference, for upwards of three centuries, of indigenous populations of the Old World to a continent where they have been subjected to many novel geographical, climatic, and social influences. There, too, has taken place, on a scale without any parallel elsewhere, an intimate and prolonged intermixture of some of the most highly cultured races of Europe with purely savage tribes, under circumstances which have tended to place them, for the time being, on an equality as hunters, trappers, or explorers of their vast forest and prairie wilds.

The whole question of heredity, its phenomena and results, is now in process of review under the novel phases that affect anthropology; and in this view the illustrations which the New World supplies in reference to hybridity and absorption have a distinctive value. The anthropologist recognises various elements marking diversity of race in stature, colour, proportion of limbs, conformation of skull, colour and other characteristics of eye and hair. He also notes no less distinctively the diverse intellectual and moral aptitudes. Noticeable as are the diversities of national type in Europe, the range of variation is trifling when compared with the conditions under which the White, Red, and Black races have met and intermingled in the West Indies and in North and South America. The cultured and civilised races of Europe have there united their blood with the African negro and the native Indian savage; and both admixtures have been carried out on so great a scale as to furnish indisputable data for determining the question how far the half-breed is a mean between the two parents; or if there is any inevitable preponderance of one of them, with a tendency to revert to one or the other type. The intermarriage of fair and dark races of the Old World has gone on throughout the whole historic period, with apparently resultant intermediate types. The Iberians and “black Celts” of Western Europe, and the dark brunettes of the Mediterranean shores, stand out in marked contrast to the blondes of the Baltic shores. Whatever may be said of other diversities of race, Professor Huxley is led to the opinion that the Melanochroi, or dark whites, are not a distinct group, but the metis resultant from just such a mixture of his “Australioids” and his “Xanthocroi,” as has been going on for centuries on the American continent between the blondes of Europe and the native olive-skinned American, and between both of them and the dark African race.

Yet, on the other hand, many anthropologists insist on the survival of distinct types, even among approximate races, as shown in the remarkable persistency of the Jewish type, notwithstanding the modifications that have resulted from intermarriage with fair and dark races of many lands. Dr. F. von Luschan, in describing the Tachtadschy,[148] calls attention to the fact that the Greeks of Lycia represent a mixture of two distinct types. From this he draws the following inference: “At first glance it appears remarkable and hardly probable that two disparate types should remain distinct, although intermarriage has continued without interruption through thousands of years. But we must acknowledge that it would be just as remarkable if continued intercrossing should result in the production of a middle type (_Mischform_). It is true that at the present time the greater number of anthropologists appear to be of the opinion that middle forms originate wherever two distinct types live in close contact for a long time. If this is true at all, it is true only in a very limited sense, and still needs to be proven. _A priori_, we rather ought to expect that one or the other of these types would soon succumb in the struggle for existence. It would become extinct, and give way to the other type; or both types might continue to co-exist, although intercrossing might go on for centuries. They would undergo no other changes than those which each singly, uninfluenced by the other, would have undergone by the agency of physical causes.”

The evidence we possess of the physical characteristics of the succession of races in Europe from palæolithic times is already considerable; and in reference to neolithic and later periods is ample. Within the recent historic period of the decline and fall of Rome, and the influx of Northern and Asiatic barbarians, the evidence of admixture of race is abundant; and the physical, intellectual, and moral changes resulting therefrom have stamped their ineffaceable impress on history. But the conditions under which the meeting of the Aryans with Allophylians, Neolithians, or other prehistoric races took place in older centuries, can only be surmised; and the many analogies resulting from the intrusion of the European races on the aborigines of the western hemisphere are calculated to render useful aid in determining some definite results.

History has familiarised us with the idea of sovereign and subject races. The monuments of Egypt perpetuate the fact from its remote dawn, Punic, Roman, Gothic, Frank, Saracenic, and Scandinavian races, have in turn subdued others, and made them subservient to their will. Evidence of a different kind, but little less definite, points to the intrusion into Europe in prehistoric times of races superior alike in physical type, and in the arts upon which progress depends, to the Autochthones, or primitive occupants of the soil. Further indications have been assumed to point to the contemporaneous presence, in primeval Britain, as elsewhere, of races of diverse type, and apparently in the relation of lord and serf: a natural if not indeed inevitable consequence of the intrusion of a superior race of conquerors.

But in the New World the inaptitude of the native race for useful serfdom largely contributed to the introduction there of other and very diverse races from Africa and Asia; so that now within a well-defined North American area, indigenous populations of the three continents of the Old World are displacing its native races. Still more, all three meet there under circumstances which inevitably lead to their intermixture with one another, and with the native races.

Various terms, such as Iberian, Silurian, Canstadt, Cimbric, Finnish, and Turanian, have been applied to primitive types as expressive of the hypothesis of their origin. But on turning to the American continent we see vast regions occupied exclusively until a comparatively recent period by tribes of savage hunters, upon whom some of the most civilised races of Europe have intruded, with results in many respects so strikingly accordant with the supposed evolution of the Melanochroi of the Old World, that we seem to look upon a series of ethnological experiments prolonged through centuries, with synthetic results to a large extent confirmatory of previous inductions.

The intermingling of very diverse races at present taking place on the American continent includes some of widely diverse types. There is seen the Portuguese in Brazil; the Spaniard in Peru, Mexico, Central America, and in Cuba; the African in the West Indies and the Southern States; the Chinese on the Pacific; the Frenchman on the St. Lawrence; the German, the Italian, the Norwegian, the Icelander, the Celt, and the Anglo-Saxon: all subjected to novel influences, necessarily testing the results of a change of climate, of diet, and of social habits, on the ethnical character of each. There too, alike in the Red and the Black races, we can study the results of hybridity carried out on a scale adequate to determine many important points calculated to throw light on the origin and perpetuation of diverse races of mankind.

The growth of a race of hybrid African blood has been one of the results of the substitution at an early date of imported negro slaves to supply the place of the rapidly disappearing Indians who perished under the exactions of their taskmasters. According to careful data set forth in the United States census for 1850, the whole number of native Africans imported cannot have exceeded 400,000. At present the coloured race—hybrids chiefly—of African blood numbers nearly 7,000,000. In 1715 there were 58,000 negroes in British America; in 1775, when the revolution broke out, there were 501,102. After the epoch of independence the increase became more rapid. In 1790 the numbers were 757,208; in 1800, 893,041; in 1810, 1,191,364. At the date of emancipation in 1865 there were, in round numbers, in slavery, 4,000,000; and at the census in 1880 the negro population in the United States had risen to 6,580,793;[149] and in the returns thus far published relative to the later census of 1890, in the Southern States alone they are reported to number 6,996,116; so that with the added numbers of the Northern States and Canada they can fall little short of 8,000,000. Of this numerous intrusive race, the larger number are hybrids; and, as was inevitable, they include some small proportion of mixed negro and Indian blood.[150] But it is the Metis, or White and Red half-breed, that constitutes the subject of special interest here.

Various causes have tended to beget more friendly relations between the older colonists of New France, and at a later date between those of British America and the native Indian race, than have existed either in Spanish America or the United States.

The great North-West, with its warlike Chippeways, Crees, Sioux, and Blackfeet; and beyond the Rocky Mountains its Tinné, Babeens, Clalams, Newatees, Chinooks, Cowlitz, and numerous other native tribes; had till recently been under the control of the all-powerful fur-trading company of Hudson Bay. The interests of the fur-traders stimulated them to fair and honourable dealing with the native tribes; and while they had no motive to encourage the Indians to abandon their nomadic life for the civilised habits of a settled people, or even to interpose in the wars which varied the monotony of the Indians’ wild hunter-life, they had so thoroughly won the confidence of the natives, that tribes at open enmity with each other were ready to repose equal confidence in the Hudson Bay factors.

The late Paul Kane, author of _Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America_, informed me that when travelling beyond the Rocky Mountains he found no difficulty in transmitting his correspondence home, even when among the rudest Flathead savages. His packet, entrusted to one of the tribe, was accompanied with a small gift of tobacco, and the request to have it forwarded to Fort Garry, or other Hudson Bay fort. The messenger—Cowlitz, Chinook, Nasquallie, or other Indian,—carried it to the frontier of his own hunting-grounds, and then sold it for so much tobacco to some Indian of another tribe; by him it was passed on, by like process of barter, till it crossed the Rocky Mountains into the territory of the Blackfeet, the Crees, and so onward to its destination, in full confidence that the officers of the Hudson Bay Fort would sustain the credit of the White Medicine-man (for so the painter was regarded), and redeem the packet at its full value in tobacco or other equivalent.

The personal interests of the little bands of European fur-traders thus settled in the heart of a wilderness, and surrounded by savage hunters, no less strongly prompted them to exclude the maddening fire-water from the vast regions under their control. Guns and ammunition, kettles, axes, knives, beads, and other trinkets, with the no less prized tobacco, were abundantly provided for barter. Even nails and the iron hoops of their barrels were traded with the Indians, and displaced the primitive tomahawk and arrow head of flint or stone. Thus, curiously, the Stone period of a people still in the most primitive stage of barbarism has been superseded by the use of metals obtained solely by barter, and without any advance either in the knowledge of metallurgy, or in the mastery of the arts which lie at the foundation of all civilisation. Long before the advent of Europeans, the Chippeways along the shores of Lake Superior had been familiar with the native copper which abounds there in the condition of pure metal. But they knew it only as a kind of malleable stone; nor have they even now learned the application of fire in their simple metallurgic processes. The root of their names for iron and copper is the same abstract term, _wahbik_, used only in compound words, and apparently in the sense of rock or stone. _Pewahbik_ is iron; _ozahwahbik_, copper, literally the yellow stone. It formed no part of the Hudson Bay traders’ aim to advance him beyond the stage of a savage hunter. It was incompatible with the interests of the fur-trader to teach him any higher use of the rich prairie land than that of a wilderness inhabited by fur-bearing animals, or a grazing ground for the herds of buffalo which furnished their annual supply of pemmican; or to familiarise him with more of the borrowed arts of civilisation than helped to facilitate the accumulation of peltries in the factory stores. Hence the intrusive Europeans and the native tribes met on common ground, engaged in the same pursuits, all tending to foster the habits of hunter-life; and so presenting a close analogy to the condition of Europe when, in its Neolithic age, its rude hunter tribes were invaded by the Aryans. Thus engaged to a large extent in the same pursuits, the Whites and Indians of the Canadian North-West have dwelt together for successive generations on terms of comparative equality, and with results of curious interest, hereafter referred to, in relation to the intermingling of the races.

In the long-settled provinces of Canada it has been otherwise. There the aborigines had to be gathered together on suitable reserves, and induced to accommodate themselves in some degree to the habits of an industrious agricultural population; or to be driven out, to wander off into the great hunting-grounds of the uncleared West. The exterminating native wars, which preceded the settlement of Upper Canada, greatly facilitated this; and the tribes with which the English colonists of Ontario have had to deal have been for the most part immigrants, not greatly less recent than themselves. As to the Six Nation Indians settled on the Grand River and at the Bay of Quinté (the most numerous and the farthest advanced in civilisation of all the Indians in the British provinces), they are a body of loyalist refugees who followed the fortunes of their English allies on the declaration of independence by the revolted Colonies; and there is now in use, at the little Indian Church at Tuscarora, the silver Communion Plate presented to their ancestors while still in the valley of the Mohawk, in the State of New York, the gift of Her Majesty Queen Anne, “to her Indian Chappel of the Mohawks.”[151]

But the civilisation which has thus resulted from prolonged and intimate relations with the Whites, has been accompanied by an inevitable admixture of blood, of which the results are abundantly manifest in the physical characteristics of the Indian settlers, both on the Grand river and at the Bay of Quinté. The system of adopting members of other tribes, including even those of their vanquished foes, to recruit their own numbers, was practised by many of the North American tribes, and was familiar to the Iroquois, or Indians of the Five Nations, as they were styled before the admission of the Tuscaroras to their confederacy. In 1649, for example, the survivors of two of the Huron towns which they had ravaged, besought the favour of the victors, and were adopted into the Seneca nation. Nor did extreme differences of race interfere with affiliation, as in the case of children kidnapped from the White colonists in their vicinity. One interesting example of the latter suffices to illustrate the extent to which such a process tended to affect the ethnical purity of the race.

In the year 1779, while the Mohawks still dwelt in their native valley in the State of New York, Ste-nah, a white girl, then about twelve years of age, was captured in one of their marauding expeditions, and adopted into the tribe. In 1868, while still living, she was described to me by an educated Mohawk India, as a full-blood _Sko-ha-ra_, or Dutchwoman. She grew up among her captors, accompanied the tribe on their removal from the Mohawk valley to the shores of the Bay of Quinté, and married one of the Mohawk braves. She had reached mature years, and was the mother of Indian children, when an aged stranger visited the reserve in search of his long-lost daughter. He had heard of a captive white woman who survived among the emigrant Mohawks there, and was able, by certain marks, and the scar of a wound received in childhood, to identify his long-lost daughter. But the discovery came too late. As my Mohawk informant told me, she had got an Indian heart. She had, indeed, lost her native tongue; had acquired the habits and sympathies of her adopted people; and coldly repelled the advances of her aged father, who in vain recalled his long-lost daughter Christina in the Mohawk white-blood, _Ste-nah_. If the date of her capture and her estimated age can be relied on, she must have been in her hundred and fifth year at the time of her death, in December 1871. I have received through one of her grandsons—himself a Mohawk chief,—a genealogical table of her descendants, from which it appears that there are at the present time fifty-seven of them living and twenty-three dead. It is thus apparent, that by the adoption of a single White captive into the tribe, there are, in the fourth generation, fifty-seven survivors out of eighty members of the tribe, all of them of hybrid character.

The influence of a single case of admixture of White blood, thus followed out to its results in the fourth generation, suffices to show how largely those tribes must be affected who dwell for any length of time in close vicinity to White settlers, and in intimate friendly relations with them. The earlier French and English colonists, like the Hudson Bay traders of later times, were mostly young adventurers, without wives, and readily entering into alliance with the native women. The children of such unions were admitted to a perfect equality with the Whites, when trained up in their settlements; and in the older period of French and English rivalry the Indians were dealt with on very different terms from those with which they are now regarded, though even yet some memory of older relations survives.

During the wars between the French and English colonists to the north and south of the St. Lawrence, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the alliance of neighbouring Indian tribes was courted; and the traditions of the fidelity of the Hurons to the French, and the loyalty of the Iroquois to the English, are cherished as incentives to the fulfilment of obligations entered into on behalf of the little remnant of the Huron nation remaining on the river St. Charles, below Quebec; and to a liberal and generous policy towards the Six Nation Indians settled on the Grand river and elsewhere in Western Canada.

But also in the primitive simplicity of border life, the half-civilised Indian and the rude settler meet on common ground; and in some cases the friendly relations established between them have survived the more settled condition of agricultural progress in the clearings. In this respect the older colonists of Quebec fraternised far more readily with the native population than has been the case with English settlers. The relations in which the early French colonists stood to the Indians of Lower Canada bore more resemblance to those of the fur-traders of the North-West in later times, and were of a kindlier nature than those of the intrusive European emigrants of the present century. Prior to the accession of Louis XIV. to the throne, the French possessions in the New World had been regarded as little more than a hunting-ground to be turned to the same account as the Hudson Bay Company’s territory; and the peopling of Canada had given little promise of permanent colonisation. Priests and nuns alone varied the usual class of trading adventurers who resort to a young colony. But soon after the King reached his majority, a systematic shipment of emigrants to Canada was organised under the direction of Colbert; sundry companies of soldiers were disbanded in the colony; and then, at last, the necessity of finding wives for the settlers was recognised. Thereupon a system of female emigration, with bounties on marriage, was established. Colbert, writing to the Canadian Intendant, tells him that the prosperity of the people, and all that is most dear to them as colonists, depend upon their securing the marriage of youths not later than their eighteenth or nineteenth year to girls at fourteen or fifteen; and the next step was to impose a fine on the father of a family who neglected to marry his children when they reached the respective ages of twenty and sixteen.

Up to this period the native women had chiefly supplied wives for the colonists; nor was this element now ignored or slighted. In the _Mémoire sur l’Etat Présent du Canada_, 1667, it is stated: “At this time it was believed that the Indians, mingled with the French, might become a valuable part of the population. The reproductive qualities of Indian women therefore became an object of attention to Talon, the Royal Intendant; and he reports that they impair their fertility by nursing their children longer than is needful; but, he adds, ‘this obstacle to the speedy building up of the colony can be overcome by regulations of police.’” Thus it is apparent that the strongest encouragement was given to such alliances.

The religious element, moreover, among a purely Roman Catholic population, helped to foster a sense of equality in the case of the Christianised Indian; while the gentler and less progressive habits of the French habitants have tended to prevent direct collision with the Indians settled in their midst. Hence in the province of Quebec, half-breeds, and men and women of partial Indian blood, are frequently to be met with in all ranks of life; and slighter traces, discernible in the hair, the eye, the cheek-bone, and peculiar mouth, as well as certain traits of Indian character, suggest to the close observer remote indications of the same admixture of blood.

But while favouring influences in national character, political institutions, and religion, all united to encourage a more friendly intercourse between the native and European population of Lower Canada, the circumstances attendant on the settlement of new clearings have everywhere led in some degree to similar results; and experience abundantly proves the impossibility of preserving distinct two races living in close proximity to each other.

Throughout the old provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, and the Maritime Provinces, where the aborigines are mostly congregated on reserves, under the charge of Government officers of the Indian Department, they appear, with few exceptions, to have passed the critical stage of transition from a nomadic state to that of assimilation to the habits of settled industry of the Whites.

The native tribes of the old provinces of the Dominion, though bearing a variety of names, may all be classed under the two essentially distinct groups of Algonkins and Iroquois. Under the former head properly rank the Micmacs, and other tribes of Prince Edward’s Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick; and the Chippeways, including Ottawas, Mississagas, Pottawattomies, etc., of Ontario. Under the other head have to be placed not only the Six Nations—Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras,—but also the Wyandots, or Hurons, both of Upper and Lower Canada; though among the one were found the faithful allies of the English, while the other adhered persistently to the French; and to the deadly enmity between them was due the expulsion of the Hurons from their ancient territory on the Georgian Bay, and the extermination of all but an insignificant remnant, including the refugees on the St. Charles river, below Quebec.

The Canadian census of 1871 includes the aborigines in the enumeration of the population of the Dominion, and states the grand total of the Indians of the Provinces of Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, at 23,035.

That the Indian population, gathered on their own reserved lands under the care of Government superintendents, is not diminishing in numbers, appears to be universally admitted. But as, at the same time, the pure race is being largely replaced by younger generations of mixed blood, the results cannot be looked upon as encouraging the hope of perpetuating the native Indian race under such exceptional conditions; nor can it be overlooked that the increase is partly begot by the addition of a foreign element. At best the results point rather to such a process of absorption as appears to be the inevitable result wherever a race, alike inferior in numbers and in progressive energy, escapes extirpation at the hands of the intruders.

In the boyhood of the older generation of Toronto, hundreds of Indians, including those of the old Mississaga tribe, were to be seen about the streets. Now, at rare intervals, two or three squaws, in round hats, blue blankets, and Indian leggings, attract attention less by their features than their dress; for in complexion they are nearly as white as those of pure European descent. The same is the case on all the oldest Indian reserves. The Hurons of Lorette, whose forefathers were brought to Lower Canada after the massacre of their nation by the Iroquois in 1649, are reported to have considerably increased in numbers in the interval between 1844 and the last census. But while the Commissioners refer to them as a band of Indians “the most advanced in civilisation in the whole of Canada,” they add that “they have, by the intermixture of White blood, so far lost the original purity of race as scarcely to be considered as Indians.” In their case this admixture with the European race has been protracted through a period of upwards of two centuries, till they have lost their Indian language, and substituted for it a French patois. Were it not for their hereditary right to a share in certain Indian funds, which furnishes an inducement to perpetuate their descent from the Huron nation, they would long since have merged in the common stock. Yet the results would not thereby have been eradicated, but only lost sight of. Their baptismal registers and genealogical traditions supply the record of a practical, though undesigned, experiment as to the influence of hybridity on the perpetuation of the race, and show the mixed descendants of Huron and French blood still, after a lapse of upwards of two centuries, betraying no traces of a tendency towards infertility or extinction.

In the Maritime Provinces the Micmacs are the representatives of the aboriginal owners of the soil. Small encampments of them may be encountered in summer on the Lower St. Lawrence, busily engaged in the manufacture of staves, barrel-hoops, axe-handles, and baskets of various kinds, which they dispose of, with much shrewdness, to the traders of Quebec, and the smaller towns on the Gulf. So far as I have seen, the pure-blood Micmac has more of the dark-red, in contrast to the prevalent olive hue, than other Indians. But the Micmacs of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick reveal the same evidence of inevitable amalgamation with the predominant race as elsewhere. The Rev. S. T. Rand—a devoted missionary labouring among the Indians of Nova Scotia,—on being asked to obtain a photograph of a pure-blood representative of the tribe, had some difficulty in finding a single example, and stated that not one is to be found among the younger generation.

In the old provinces the Indians are in the minority; but the same process is apparent where little bands of pioneers leave the settled provinces and states to begin new clearings, or to engage in the adventurous life of hunters and trappers in the far West. The hunter finds a bride among the native women; and when at length the wild tribe recedes before the growing clearing and the diminished supplies of game, it not only leaves behind a half-breed population as the nucleus of the civilised community, but it also carries away with it a like element, increasingly affecting the ethnical character of the whole tribe.

The same circumstances have continued, in every frontier settlement, to involve the inevitable production of a race of half-breeds. Even the cruellest exterminations of hostile tribes have rarely been carried out so effectually as to preclude this. In New England, for example, after the desolating war of 1637, which resulted in the extinction of the Pequot tribe, Winthrop thus summarily records the policy of the victors: “We sent the male children to Bermuda by Mr. William Pierce, and the women and maid children are disposed about in the towns.” Such a female population could not grow up in a young colony, with the wonted preponderance of males, and leave no traces in subsequent generations.

Seeing, then, that the meeting of two types of humanity so essentially distinct as the European and the native Indian of America, has, for upwards of three centuries, led to the production of a hybrid race, it becomes an interesting question, what has been the ultimate result? Has the mixed breed proved infertile, and so disappeared; has it perpetuated a new and permanent type of intermediate characteristics; or has it been absorbed into the predominant European race without leaving traces of this foreign element? These questions are not without their significance even in reference to the policy in dealing with the Indian settlements in old centres of population; for the traces of this intermingling of the races of the Old and New World are neither limited to frontier settlements nor to Indian reserves.

Among Canadians of mixed blood there are men at the Bar and in the Legislature, in the Church, in the medical profession, holding rank in the army, in aldermanic and other civic offices, and engaged in active trade and commerce. A curious case was recently brought before the law courts in Ontario. A son of the chief of the Wyandot Indians settled in Western Canada, left the reserves of his tribe, engaged in business, and acquired a large amount of real estate and personal property. He won for himself, moreover, such general respect that he was elected Reeve of Anderdon by a considerable majority over a White candidate. Thereupon his rival applied to have him unseated, on the plea that a person of Indian blood was not a citizen in the eye of the law. Fortunately the judge took a common-sense view of the case, and decided that as he held a sufficient property-qualification within the county, the election was valid.

That an Indian ceases to be such in the eye of the law, and in all practical relations to society, when he becomes an educated industrious member of the general community, and competes not only for its privileges but for its highest honours, is inevitable. But it is not with the Indian as with the Negro mixed race. The privileges and the disabilities of the Indian ward may both be cast off; but a certain degree of romance attaches to Indian blood, when accompanied with the culture and civilisation of the European. The descendants of Brant and other distinguished native chiefs are still proud to claim their lineage, where the physical traces of such an ancestry would escape the eye of a common observer. Traces of Indian descent may be recognised among ladies of attractive refinement and intelligence, and with certain mental as well as physical traits which add to the charm of their society. Similar indications of the blood of the aborigines are familiar to Canadians in the gay assemblies of a Governor-General’s receptions, in the halls of Legislature, in the diocesan synods and other ecclesiastical assemblies, and amongst the undergraduates of Canadian universities.

But the condition of men and women of mixed blood, admitted to all the privileges of citizenship, and mingling in perfect equality with all other members of the community, is in striking contrast to that of the occupants of the Indian reserves, where they are settled, for the most part in isolated bands, in the midst of a progressive White population. Such a condition is manifestly an unfavourable one, and one, moreover, which cannot be regarded as other than transitional. They are confessedly dealt with as wards, in a state of pupilage.

A growing sense of the necessity for some modification of this system has been felt for a considerable time; and in 1867 “An Act to encourage the gradual Civilisation of the Indian Tribes,” received the royal assent. This Act avowedly aims at the “gradual removal of all legal distinctions between them and Her Majesty’s other Canadian subjects; and to facilitate the acquisition of property, and of the rights accompanying it, by such individual members of the said tribes as shall be found to desire such encouragement, and to have deserved it.”

That the ultimate result of this will involve the disappearance of the Indian as a distinct race is inevitable. He will be absorbed into the dominant race; not to be displaced or driven out of the community; but to be perpetuated, as the precursors of the blonde Aryans of Europe still survive in the “dark Whites” that now, in undisputed equality, enjoy all the rights of citizenship of a common race. They will indeed constitute but a small remnant of the nations of Euramerican blood. That whole tribes and peoples of the American aborigines have been exterminated in the process of colonisation of the New World is no more to be questioned, than that a similar result followed from the Roman conquest and colonisation of Britain. Nevertheless, long and careful study of the subject has satisfied me that a larger amount of absorption of the Indian into the Anglo-American race has occurred than is generally recognised.

Fully to appreciate this, it is necessary to retrace the course of events by which America has been transferred to the descendants of European colonists. At every fresh stage of colonisation, or of pioneering into the wild West, the work has necessarily been accomplished by hardy young adventurers, or the hunters or trappers of the clearing. It is rare indeed for such to be accompanied by wives or daughters. Where they find a home they take to themselves wives from among the native women; and their offspring share in whatever advantages the father transplants with him to this home in the wilderness. To such mingling of blood, in its least favourable aspects, the prejudices of the Indian present little obstacle. Henry, in his narrative of travel among the Cristineaux on Lake Winipagoos upwards of a century ago, after describing the dress and allurements of the women, adds: “One of the chiefs assured me that the children borne by their women to Europeans were bolder warriors and better hunters than themselves.” This idea recurs in various forms. The half-breed lumberers and trappers are valued throughout Canada for their hardihood and patient endurance; the half-breed hunters and trappers are equally esteemed in the Hudson Bay territory; and beyond their remotest forts Dr. Kane reported, as his experience within the Arctic circle, that “the half-breeds of the coast rival the Esquimaux in their powers of endurance.”

Mr. Charles Horetskey, in his _Canada on the Pacific_, after remarking on the well-known fact that Japanese junks have been known to drift on to the Pacific coast of America, and so contribute new elements of Mongolian character to the native population, thus proceeds to notice another element of hybridity. “There is,” he says, “another mixture in the blood on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and a very marked one—the Spanish, owing to the Spaniards having long had a settlement at Nootka. Strangely enough, the Spanish cast of countenance does not show in the women, who have the same flat features as their sisters to the eastward. Nor is it so noticeable among the young men, many of whom, however, have beards—a most unusual appendage among American Indians, and of course traceable to the cause referred to. The features are more observable among the older men, many of whom, with their long, narrow, pointed faces and beards, would, if washed, present very fair models for Don Quixote.” Within the region of Alaska, Russian traders have contributed another element to the mingling of races; and Mr. Wm. H. Dall, in his _Alaska and its Resources_, states specifically the number of the Creoles or half-breeds of that region as 1421. But the present condition of society there favours their increase. In 1842, they were, for the first time, qualified to enter the Church as priests; and in 1865, the American Expedition found Ivan Pavloff, the son of a Russian father and a native woman of Kenai, filling the office of Bidarshik, or commander of the post at Nulato. He was legally married to a full-blooded Indian woman, by whom he had a large family.

Another intrusive element, that of the Asiatic Mongol, has awakened alarm for the possible future of the white race of settlers, both in America and in Australia. In 1875 the number of Chinese in California amounted to 130,000; 19,000 arrived in a single year. They speedily made their way to the New England States, and to Eastern Canada; till it has been deemed politic to forbid further immigration. It is the intrusion of a type approximating to the American Mongol, and so has a special interest in its bearing on the ethnology of the continent; for here we see the approximate types of Asia and America brought into contact, it may be as descendants of a common stock, separated through unnumbered centuries by untraversed oceans.

The Indians of Vancouver Island and British Columbia were estimated in 1860 to number 75,000. The observations of Paul Kane in 1846 showed that a considerable half-breed population already existed then in the vicinity of every Hudson Bay fort. But at the later date the reported richness of the gold-diggings was attracting hundreds of settlers; and as usual, in such cases, nearly all males. The admixture of blood with the native population consequent on such a social condition is inevitable; and though such a population is least likely to leave behind it any permanent traces among settled civilised colonists, yet the condition of things which it presents illustrates the social life of every frontier settlement of the New World. Everywhere the colonisation of the outlying territory begins with a migration of males, and by and by the cry comes from Australia, Canada, and elsewhere, for stimulated female emigration. It is a state of things old as the dispersion of the human race, and typified in such ancient legends as the Roman Rape of the Sabines. The abstract of the United States census of 1860 showed that the old settled states of New England are affected even more than European countries by this inevitable source of the disparity of the sexes. In Massachusetts, at that date, the females outnumbered the males by upwards of 37,000; while in Indiana, on the contrary, they fell short of the males by 48,000.

In the latter case, on a frontier state, where the services of the Indian women must necessarily be courted in any attempt at domestic life, intermixture between the native and intruding races is inevitable, and the feeling with which it is regarded finds expression constantly through the genuine New World lyrics of Joaquin Miller, with his “brown bride won from an Indian town”—

Where some were blonde and some were brown,
And all as brave as Sioux.

Thus the same process still repeats itself along the widening frontier of the far West, which has been in operation on the American continent from the days of Columbus and Cabot. Hardy bands of pioneer adventurers, or the solitary hunter and trapper, wander forth to brave the dangers of the prairie or savage-haunted forest, and to such, an Indian bride proves the fittest mate. Of the mixed offspring a portion cling to the fortunes of the mother’s race, and are involved in its fate; but more adhere to those of the white father, share with him the vicissitudes of border life, and cast in their lot with the first nucleus of a settled community. As the border land slowly recedes into the further West, new settlers crowd into the clearing; the little cluster of primitive log-huts grows up into the city, perhaps the capital of a state, and with a new generation the traces of Indian blood are well nigh forgotten. If any portion of the aboriginal owners of the soil linger in the neighbourhood, they are no less affected by the predominant intruding race.

The transfer of the rich prairie lands of the great North-West from the care of Hudson Bay factors and trappers, the organisation of it into the Province of Manitoba, and the territories already in preparation for new provinces, under the government of their own legislatures, has necessarily brought to an end the condition of things so favourable to friendly relations between the White and Red races. The region, moreover, is now traversed by the Canadian Pacific Railway; and the herds of buffalo, on which the Indian mainly depended for his supplies of food, fur robes, and teepe skins, have finally disappeared. Railways, telegraph lines, and other appliances of civilisation are equally incompatible with the existence of the wild buffalo and the wild Indian. The former inevitably vanished from the scene. It remains to be seen if the latter can adapt himself to the novel conditions of such an environment.

As some preparation for the inevitable revolution, the half-breeds, already numbering thousands, accustomed to mingle on perfect equality with the Whites, and trained in some partial degree to agricultural industry, entered on the possession of farms allotted to them by the Government. But such a transitional stage, forced into premature development, could scarcely be expected to pass through all its revolutionary stages without a conflict, and clashing of interests; and the efforts of the Dominion Government to deal with this novel condition of things were only partially successful. But perhaps the most notable feature in the results has been that the chief difficulty was, not with the wild tribes transferred from the management of the fur-traders to the direct jurisdiction of the Government, but with the half-breeds, claiming civil rights, and jealously resenting encroachments on lands appropriated for their own settlement.

The reports of the Indian Department supply interesting glimpses of the process of adjustment with the various tribes of natives reluctantly yielding to the new condition of things. Returns made to an address of the House of Commons at Ottawa, dated March 1873, disclose the jealousies and suspicions of the native tribes, and the anxiety evinced by the Government officials to remove all just grounds of complaint. Mr. Beatty, a contractor for certain surveys on the Upper Assiniboine, reports that the Portage Indians, under their chief, Yellow Quill, had absolutely forbidden any survey of their lands, and driven him and his party off the field. The Lieutenant-Governor thereafter held an interview with Yellow Quill and a party of his braves, and after a long _pow-wow_ succeeded in pacifying him. Again, a party of about two thousand Sioux are reported to have left in high dudgeon, with a threat to return in force next spring; and the Hon. Alexander Morris—now Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba—writes to the Provincial Secretary at Ottawa, that “The Red Lake Indians on the American side have been sending tobacco to the Sioux in our territory, as it is believed, with the view of common action with regard to the Boundary Survey.” For the settlement of provinces, and the surveying of the prairie for disposal to its new occupants, had necessitated the determination of a well-defined boundary between the Canadian territories and those of the United States. Only a few years had elapsed since the State of Minnesota was desolated by a cruel war, carried on by the Sioux at the instigation, as was then affirmed, of Southern agents, with a view to a diversion in favour of the South during the great Civil War. A large number of the Sioux have since crossed the boundary, and settled within the British lines; and the Hon. Mr. Morris writes from Fort Garry in December last: “Some of the Sioux assist the white settlers as labourers in the summer. They have asked for land, and were led to believe that they would be assigned a reserve, and, if so, they would plant crops, and could then be removed from the settlement.” But Mr. Morris specially draws the attention of the provincial authorities to the excited state apparent among all the Western tribes, and adds: “I believe it to be in part created by the Boundary Commission. They do not understand it, and think the two nations are uniting against them.” The difficulties, however, were overcome; and the reports of the Indian agents contain some curious illustrations of the difficulties inevitable in the first attempt at transforming wild Indian tribes into prairie farmers. One of them thus writes: “The full demands of the Indians cannot be complied with; but there is, nevertheless, a certain paradox in asking a wild Indian, who has hitherto gained his livelihood by hunting and trapping, to settle down on a reservation and cultivate the land, without at the same time offering him some means of making his living. As they say themselves: ‘We cannot tear down the trees and build huts with our teeth, we cannot break the prairie with our hands, nor reap the harvest, if we had grown it, with our knives.’” But even among the wild tribes of the prairies a great diversity in habits, and in aptitude for the new life now forced upon them as their only chance of survival, is apparent. The Portage Indians clung to their old status as hunters living in their buffalo-skin lodges on the prairies; the St. Peter Indians form permanent settlements, not only of birch-bark wigwams, but many of them have built log-houses for themselves. Even among the tribes already settling down to steady agricultural labour, such as the Saulteux and the Swampies of Manitoba, a very great difference both in sentiments and customs prevail. Thirty-four Indian families from one tribe in Pembina are reported by the agent as demanding their allocation of farms; the chiefs and headmen of other tribes are in negotiation for farming implements, stock, etc., and some of their demands curiously illustrate the form in which the new life thus opening up to them presents its most tempting aspects. Hoes, axes, and other indispensable implements have been readily granted to them. Ploughs, harrows, and oxen are in request, and have been conceded or promised where the Government agent is satisfied that they will be turned to good account. But in special demand is “a bull and cow for each chief, and a boar for each reserve.” The incipient idea of the stock farm is indeed apparent in the universal demand of all: “A promise,” says one of the agents, “which the Indians never omit to mention, that they shall be supplied with a male and female of each animal used by a farmer.” But the transformation of the wild hunter into an industrious agriculturist is a difficult process; and even in the new generation, born under such changed conditions, the Indian boy shows much greater aptitude for mechanical employments; and takes more readily to the work of the carpenter than to that of tilling the soil, which, so long as the Indian was its lord, was practised exclusively by the women of the tribe.

Could the older condition of interblended prairie life have been sufficiently long perpetuated, the results would far more fully have presented results in close analogy to the intermingling of Europe’s aboriginal and Aryan races in prehistoric times. A settlement begun by Lord Selkirk in 1811, was formed on the Red River within the area now embraced in the Province of Manitoba. It consisted of hardy Orkney men and Sutherlandshire Highlanders; and on the amalgamation of the North-West and the Hudson Bay Companies, the settlement received considerable additions to its numbers. When at length the great fur Companies’ supremacy came to an end, the community numbered upwards of two thousand whites, chiefly occupied in farming, or in the service of the Company. At a later date, another settlement was formed on the Assiniboine river, chiefly by French Canadians. In those, as at the forts and trading-posts of the Hudson Bay Company, the settlers consisted chiefly of young men. They had no choice but to wed or cohabit with the Indian women; and the result has been, not only the growth of a half-breed population greatly out-numbering the Whites, but the formation of a tribe of half-breeds, divided into two distinct bands, according to their Scottish or French paternity, who kept themselves distinct in manners, habits, and allegiance, alike from the Whites and the Indians.

This rise of an independent half-breed tribe is one of the most remarkable results of the great, though undesigned, ethnological experiment which has been in progress ever since the meeting of the diverse races of the Old and New World on the continent of America; and when the peculiar circumstances which favoured this result came to an end, it became a matter of great interest to note the most striking phases presented by it, before they are effaced by the influx of European emigration. I accordingly printed and circulated as widely as possible a set of queries relative to the Indian and half-breed population both of Canada and the Hudson Bay territory; and from the returns made to me by Hudson Bay factors, missionaries, and others, most of the following results are derived. The number of the settled population, either half-breed or more or less of Indian blood, in Red River and the surrounding settlements was about 7200. The intermarriage there has been chiefly with Indian women of the plain Crees, though alliances also occur with the Swampies (another branch of the Crees), and with Sioux, Chippeway, and Blackfeet women. But the most noticeable differences are traceable to the white paternity. The French half-breeds have more demonstrativeness and vivacity, but they are reported to take less readily to the steady drudgery of the farm than those of Scotch descent. But, at best, the temptations of a border settlement, with its buffalo hunts and its chief market for peltries, were little calculated to develop the industrious habits of a settled community; and the intrusion of farmers from the old provinces, and immigrants from Europe, ignorant of their habits and wholly indifferent to their interests, necessarily interfered with the healthful process of transformation into a settled industrious community of civilised half-breeds.

Some of the results elicited by the inquiries are of value in their bearing on the question of mixed races, and the apparent tendency to develop permanent varieties; and all the more so as the data thus obtained show the condition of the North-West community immediately prior to the formation of the Province of Manitoba, and the inauguration of the revolution which inevitably followed in its train. The half-breeds are a large and robust race, with greater powers of endurance than the native Indian. Mr. S. J. Dawson, of the Red River Exploring Expedition, speaks of the French half-breeds as a gigantic race as compared with the French Canadians of Lower Canada. Professor Hind refers in equally strong language to their great physical powers and vigorous muscular developments; and the venerable Archdeacon Hunter, of Red River, replied in answer to my inquiry: “In what respects do the half-breed Indians differ from the pure Indians as to habits of life, courage, strength, increase of numbers, etc.?” “They are superior in every respect, both mentally and physically.” Much concurrent evidence points to the fact that the families descended from mixed parentage are larger than those of the whites; and though the results are in some degree counteracted by a tendency to consumption, yet it does not amount to such a source of diminution on the whole as to interfere with their steady numerical increase. One of the questions circulated by me was in this form: “State any facts tending to prove or disprove that the offspring descended from mixed White and Indian blood fails in a few generations.” To this the Rev. J. Gilmour answered: “I know many large and healthy families of partial Indian blood, and have formed the opinion that they are likely to perpetuate a hardy race.” The venerable Archdeacon Hunter, familiar with the facts by long residence as a clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church among the mixed population of the Red River Settlement, answered still more decidedly: “The offspring descended from mixed White and Indian blood does not fail, but, generally speaking, by intermarriages it becomes very difficult to determine whether they are pure Whites or half-breeds.” Living, however, for many years among a people in whom the Indian traits are more or less traceable, it is probable that Archdeacon Hunter is less attracted by the modified, ample black hair, the large full mouth, and the dark, though gentle and softly expressive eye, which strikes a stranger on first coming among any frontier population of mixed blood. The half-breeds also retain much of the reserved and unimpressible manner of the Indian; though a good deal of intercourse with the native race has led me to the conclusion that this is more of an acquired habit than a strictly hereditary trait: a piece of Indian education akin to certain habits of social life universally inculcated among ourselves. When off his guard, the wild Indian betrays great inquisitiveness, and when relaxing over the camp-fire after a laborious day gives free play to mirth and loquacity.

So far, however, much that has been said applies to the mixed population of the Red River Settlement, living on a perfect equality with the white settlers, and constituting an integral part of the colony. They are neither to be confounded with the remarkable tribe of half-breed hunters, nor with the Indians of mixed blood already described, on older Canadian reserves. Remote as this settlement has hitherto been from ordinary centres of colonisation, and inaccessible except through the agency of the Hudson Bay Company, every tendency has been to encourage the introduction of the young adventurer, trapper, or _voyageur_, rather than the married settler. The habits of life incident to the fur trade made the distinction less marked between the Indian and the white man; and thus a people of peculiar type grew up there as intermediate in habits and mode of life as in blood from those of the old settled provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. Much property is now possessed by men of mixed blood. Their young men have in some cases been sent to the colleges of Canada, and, after creditably distinguishing themselves, have returned to lend their aid in the progress of the settlement. Thus a favourable concurrence of circumstances in all respects tended to give ample opportunity for testing the experiment of intermingling the blood of Europe and America, and raising up a civilised race peculiar to its soil. With the rapid influx of emigrants; the settling of the prairie lands with a population of yeomen farmers; and the rise of villages and towns along the railways and river highways; the ultimate absorption of this half-breed population, and its merging into the homogeneous community that will ultimately be fashioned out of a meeting of very diverse settlers, is inevitable. Icelanders and Danes, Germans, Russians, Italians, French, Highland crofters, and Irish Celts, are all being interfused into the new community of which the half-breed element will form no unimportant factor.

But a greater interest attaches to that other class of half-breeds already alluded to, which the new order of things has inevitably tended to efface, though not necessarily to eradicate, as an element in the population of the future province. Besides the civilised race of half-breeds, mingling on a perfect equality with the Whites; brought up in many cases in full enjoyment of such domestic training as the Hudson Bay factor and hunter could furnish in the wilderness; there remained apart from them a half-breed race, the offspring born to native women as the inevitable results of such a social condition as pertains to the occupants of the forts and trading-posts of that remote region. These half-breed buffalo hunters were wholly distinct from the civilised settlers, and yet more nearly related to them than to the wild Indian tribes. They belonged to the settlement, possessed land, and cultivated farms, though their agricultural labours were very much subordinated to the claims of the chase, and they scarcely aimed at more than supplying their own wants. The two bands numbered in all between 6000 and 7000. Each division had its separate tribal organisation and distinct hunting-grounds, extending beyond the British American frontier. In 1849 the White Horse plain half-breeds on the Strayenne river, Dakota territory, rendered the following returns to an officer appointed to take the census: “700 half-breeds, 200 Indians, 603 carts, 600 horses, 200 oxen, 400 dogs, and 1 cat.” This may illustrate the general character of a people partaking of the nomad habits of the Indian, and yet possessed of a considerable amount of movable property and real estate. They are a hardy race, fearless horsemen, and capable of enduring the greatest privations. They have adopted the Roman Catholic faith, and specially coveted the presence of a priest with them when on their hunting expeditions. The mass was celebrated on the open prairie, and was prized as a guarantee of success in the hunting-field. On such expeditions, it has to be borne in view, they were not tempted by mere love of the chase or by the prospect of a supply of game. Winter-hunting supplies to the trapper the valued peltries of the fur-bearing animals; but they depended on the summer and autumn buffalo hunts for the supply of pemmican, which furnished one of the main resources of the whole Hudson Bay population. The summer hunt kept them abroad on the prairie from about the 15th of June to the end of August, and smaller bands resumed the hunt in the autumn. With this as the favourite and engrossing work of the tribe, it is inevitable that farming could be carried on only in the most desultory fashion. Nevertheless, the severity of the winter compelled them to make provision for the numerous horses and oxen on which the summer hunt depended; and thus habits of industry and forethought were engendered.

The half-breed hunters regarded the Sioux and Blackfeet as their natural enemies, and carried on warfare with them much after the fashion of the Indian tribes that have acquired fire-arms and horses; but they gave proof of their “Christian” civilisation by taking no scalps. In the field, whether preparing for hunting or war, the superiority of the half-breeds was strikingly apparent. They then evinced a discipline, courage, and self-control, of which the wild Sioux, Crees, or Blackfeet are wholly incapable; and they accordingly looked with undisguised contempt on their Indian foes.

Such are some of the most noticeable characteristics of this interesting race, called into being by the contact of the European with the native tribes of the forest and prairie. With so many of the elements of civilisation which it is found so hard to introduce among the most intelligent native tribes, an aptitude for social organisation, and a thorough independence of all external superintendence or control, there seems no reason to doubt that here is an example of an intermediate race, combining characteristics derived from two extremely diverse types of man, with all apparent promise of perpetuity and increase, if they could have been secured in the exclusive occupation of the region in which they have originated. But the railway has traversed the trail of the buffalo; and they have been compelled to make their choice between conformity to the industrial habits of agricultural settlers, or follow the herds of the buffalo in search of some remote wilderness beyond the shriek of the locomotive and the hail of the pioneer immigrant.

The inevitable revolution was not permitted to be inaugurated without very practical protest. The Red River Expedition of Sir Garnet Wolseley in 1870 was directed to put down a revolt of the half-breeds, under their leader, Louis Riel, resolute to oppose the intrusion of immigrant settlers. The struggle was renewed in 1885 under the same leader, but with the more legitimate grievance of neglected land claims, and the assertion of their rights to property in the prairie lands and on the river fronts. They were encountered by a Canadian volunteer force; Batoche, their little urban stronghold, was captured; and the North-West rebellion was brought to an end. But it was freely acknowledged that, poorly armed and ill-provided with the indispensable requisites for meeting a well-organised force of militia, under an experienced British soldier, General Middleton, they displayed unflinching courage, and held out bravely against overwhelming numbers furnished with the deadly appliances of modern warfare.

It could not be supposed that the invasion of the western hemisphere by the wanderers from the later homes of the Aryans beyond the Atlantic could reproduce in all respects the old phenomena that marked the displacement of Europe’s prehistoric races. But making due allowance for the changes wrought on the Aryan stock by the civilising influences of twenty centuries or more; and the consequent disparity between them and the rude hunter tribes of the American forests and prairies; much remains to aid us in the interpretation of the past. Ethnological investigation and induction enable us to realise the condition of Europe when its thinly-dispersed population consisted of a dark-skinned race, small in stature, and, as we may conceive, with hair and eyes of corresponding hue. Sepulchral deposits and the chance disclosures in their old cave-shelters have made us familiar with their physical form. Their modern representatives survive on the outskirts of Europe’s civilised centres. Still more, their ethnical characteristics have been perpetuated by the very same process as may now be seen in progress in the frontier states of America and the newest provinces of the Canadian Dominion. Not only are the modern representatives of Europe’s Allophyliæ to be found among the Lapps, Finns, and the Iberians of Northern and Western Europe; but everywhere in the British Isles, and throughout Western Europe, the Melanochroic elements stand out distinctly from the predominant Xanthocroic stock, among a people unconscious of any diversity of race. Here then we see evidences of the intermingling and the partial absorption of the Australioid savage of prehistoric Europe by the later Xanthocroi, the product of which survives in the brunette of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. In Britain the contrasting characteristics of the diverse ethnical elements attracted the attention of Tacitus in the first century of our era. In Spain the Iberian still preserves the evidence of an individuality apart from the Indo-European races in the vernacular Euskara, while a large Moorish element in the southern portion of the peninsula perpetuates the results of another foreign intrusion and interblending of races within historic times.

The diversity apparent in some of the results of the meeting of dissimilar races in the Old World and the New, is due to the geographical characteristics of the two hemispheres. Alike by sea and land, Europe could be entered by invading colonists, gradually, and at many diverse points. Hence, the aggression of the higher races may be assumed to have begun while the difference between them and the aborigines of Europe was much less than that which distinguishes the European from the Bed Indian savage. The conquest would thus be protracted over a period probably of many generations, and so would involve no such collisions as inevitably result in the destruction of savage races when brought into abrupt contact with those far advanced in civilisation.

But the peculiar relations of the frontier populations of the New World, and especially of the factors, trappers, and _voyageurs_ of the Hudson Bay Company, with the native tribes, helped to create a partial equality between the civilised European and the savage, and so to beget results akin to those which have left such enduring evidences of the mingling of diverse races in the population of Europe.

This accordingly suggests a question affecting the whole relations of British and European colonists generally to the native population of new lands settled and colonised by them. Not only English, Scotch, and Irish, but German, Norwegian, Icelandic, French, Polish, Russian, and Italian emigrants flock in thousands to the New World, merge in the common stock, and in the third generation learn to speak of themselves as “Anglo-Saxon!” The investigations of ethnologists have well-nigh put an end to the supposed purity of an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Scandinavian population in all but the assumed purely Celtic areas of the British Islands; and the latest system of ethnical classification is based on the recognition of the survival in the mixed population of modern Britain of a race-element which still perpetuates an enduring influence derived from aborigines of Europe anterior to the advent of Celt or Teuton. The power of absorption and assimilation of a predominant race is great; and ethnological displacement is no more necessarily a process of extinction now than in primitive times; though intermixture must ever be most easily effected where the ethnical distinctions are least strongly marked, and the conditions of civilisation are nearly akin.

The permanent survival of a disparate type in America perpetuating the evidences of the interblending of the Red and White races may be doubted. That some ineffaceable results will remain I cannot doubt; but the enormous disparity in numbers between the millions of European nationalities, and the little remnant of the native race brought in contact with them, precludes the possibility of results such as have perpetuated in the modern races of Europe elements derived from some of its earliest savage tribes.

It has indeed been such a favourite idea with some physiologists that in the undoubted developments of something like a distinct Anglo-American type, there is a certain approximation to the Indian, that Dr. Carpenter, in his _Essay on the Varieties of Mankind_, lays claim to originality in the idea “that the conformation of the cranium seems to have undergone a certain amount of alteration, even in the Anglo-Saxon race of the United States, which assimilates it in some degree to that of the aboriginal inhabitants.” This he dwells on in some detail, and arrives at what he seems to regard as an indisputable conclusion, that the peculiar American physiognomy to which he adverts presents a transition, however slight, toward that of the North American Indian. But the long-cherished opinion, to which Dr. Morton gave currency, of the existence of one special type of skull-form common to the whole aborigines of America, has been abandoned by all who have given any attention to the evidence which Dr. Morton’s own _Crania Americana_ supplies. I doubt if the idea of such an approximation of the Anglo-American to the Red Indian type would ever have occurred to a physiologist of Canada or of New England, to whom abundant opportunities for comparing the Indian and Anglo-American features, and of noting the actual transitional forms between the two, are accessible. But if such examples can be clearly recognised, they may be assigned with probability to a reverting to the type of some Bed ancestress whose blood is transmitted to a late descendant.

But it is otherwise with the millions of the Coloured race who now constitute the indigenous population of the Southern States. They are at home there in a climate to which the White race adapts itself with very partial success. The offspring of white fathers and of mothers of the African races, they have multiplied to millions; and now with the recently acquired rights of citizenship, and with the advantages of education within their reach, the country is their own. The very social prejudices against miscegenation protect them from the effacing influences to which the Indian half-breed is exposed by ever recurrent intermarriage with the dominant race. As yet, there are discernible the various degrees of heredity from the Mulatto to the Quinteron. But the abolishing of slavery has placed the Coloured race on an entirely new footing; and left as it now is, free to enjoy the healthful social relations of a civilised community, and protected by the very prejudices of race and caste from any large intermixture with the White race, it can scarcely admit of doubt that there will survive on the American continent a Melanocroi of its own, more distinctly separated from the White race, not only by heredity, but also by climatic influences, than the “dark Whites” of Europe are from the blonde types of Hellenic, Slavic, Teutonic, or Scandinavian stocks.

-----

[148] _Reisen in Lykien_, etc., Vienna, 1889.

[149] Vide _History of the Negro Race in America_. G. W. Williams.

[150] _Science_, Feb. 13, 1891. A. F. Chamberlain.

[151] See p. 290.