shape. The infant, on the contrary, may at the period of birth be subjected to a pressure by the obstetric forceps, or by other causes operating in parturition, which completely alters the form of the skull; and during the first year its head may be moulded into the most fantastic forms that the inherited customs of savage tribes can dictate, without interfering with the healthful functions of the brain. Even by many apparently trifling causes, consequent on nursing usages, the form of the head is modified, so that the national cranial type may be the unconscious product of hereditary customs. But at a very early date the skull appears to acquire its permanent form, and thereafter resists all external pressure, less than that which suffices to crush its bony arch; nor does it seem consistent with those facts that the adult skull should be found readily susceptible of posthumous distortion by the ordinary pressure of the superincumbent earth, which, in the great majority of cases, is not found even to modify or displace the delicate nasal bones generally exposed to its direct action. CHAPTER XXIII. THE RED BLOOD OF THE WEST. THE theory of an aboriginal unity pervading one indigenous American race from the Arctic Circle to Terradel-Fuego has been shown to be liable to challenge on indisputable evidence. Moreover, the proof that the American man is in any sense separated by essential physical differences from all other nations or races of the human family, in like manner fails on minute examination. The typical white, red, and black man, placed side by side, do indeed present very strikingly contrasting characteristics; and the author still recalls with vivid force the question forced on his mind when, seated for the first time at a large public table in a southern American city, he found himself surrounded by the proscribed pariah race of Africa. A servile people, isolated from all community of interests, and from all share in the wondrous triumphs of the dominant race, presented itself there under aspects scarcely conceivable to the European, who sees a stranger of African blood mingle occasionally, like any other foreigner, in public assemblies or social circles, without being tempted to ask: Can he be indeed of one blood, and descended of the same primeval parent stock with ourselves? But the isolation of the red man is even greater, for it is voluntary and self-imposed. No prejudice of caste precludes him from a perfect equality of intercourse with the white supplanter. Intermarriage of the races carries with it no sense of degradation, and intermingling of blood involves no forfeiture of rights or privileges. Yet with all the advantages from which the African race is utterly excluded, he yields his ground even more rapidly than the encroachments of the intrusive supplanters demand; and disappears scarcely less swiftly under the guardianship of friendly superintendents and missionary civilizers, than when exposed to the exterminating violence of Spanish cupidity. Upwards of three centuries and a half have elapsed since the landing of the Spanish discoverers on the firstseen island of the Western Hemisphere; and it may be doubted if a single year has passed since that memorable event, in which some historical memorial has not perished, without the preservation of any note of its records. But the most valuable and irrecoverable of all those records are the nations that have died and left no sign. The native races of the islands of the American archipelago have been exterminated; and of many of them scarcely a relic of their language, or a memorial of their arts, their social habits, or religious rites, survives. So, in like manner, throughout the older American States, in Canada, and over the vast area which spreads westward from the Atlantic seaboard to the Rocky Mountains, whole tribes and nations have disappeared, without even a memorial-mound or pictured grave-post to tell where the last of the race is returning to the earth from whence he sprung. But such being the case, it is impossible, while regarding the claims of the American as a strictly indigenous race, to overlook the significant fact, that the negro, a foreign race, the most diverse of all from the aborigines of the New World, was introduced there solely because of his capacity of endurance and perpetuity, which is wanting in the children of the soil. This capacity of endurance experience has proved him to possess; and the fact is singularly at variance with the supposed application of the same laws to the races of man which control the circumscription of the natural provinces of the animal kingdom. The aborigines of America are indeed a people by themselves. For unknown ages they have developed all the results of physical influences, habits of life, and whatever peculiarities pertained to their geographical position, or their primeval American ancestry. Yet when we go beyond that continent which has isolated them through all the unmeasured centuries of their independent existence, it is on the neighbouring one of Eastern Asia that we find an ethnic type so nearly resembling them, that Dr. Charles Pickering, the ethnologist of the American Exploring Expedition, groups the American with the Asiatic Mongolian, as presenting the most characteristic physical traits common to both. And as the American thus presents a striking ethnical affinity to the Asiatic Mongol; so also the same physical diversities have been noted among the different tribes and nations of the New World, by which the other great ethnographic groups are broken up into minor subdivisions, and so gradually converge from opposite points towards the ideal type of a common humanity. But while those who maintain the existence of essential primary distinctions among a plurality of human species, explain such convergence towards one common type by the further theory of remote, allied, and proximate species, they accompany this with the idea that even the commingling of proximate species is opposed to natural laws, and involves the ultimate destruction of all; while the rapid extinction of the inferior types of man when "remote species," such as the European and the Red Indian, are brought into contact and commingle, is produced in evidence of the essential and primary distinction in their origin. "Sixteen mil lions of aborigines in North America," exclaims Dr. J. C. Nott, "have dwindled down to two millions since the 'Mayflower' discharged on Plymouth Rock; and their congeners, the Caribs, have long been extinct in the West Indian Islands. The mortal destiny of the whole American group is already perceived to be running out, like the sand in Time's hour-glass." By whatsoever means we may attempt to account for this, the fact is undoubted. Nor is this displacement and extinction of races of the New World, thus prominently brought under our notice as in part the result of our own responsible acts, by any means an isolated fact in the history of nations. The revelations of geology disclose to us displacement and replacement as the economy of organic life through all the vast periods which its records embrace; and among the many difficult problems which the thoughtful observer has to encounter, in an attempt to harmonize the actual with his ideal of the world as the great theatre of the human family, none is more intricate and perplexing than the displacement and extinction of races, such as has been witnessed on the American continent since first the European gained a footing on its shores. But the very existence of a science of ethnology results from the recognition of essential physical and moral differences characteristic of the subdivisions of the human family. To some these resolve themselves into the radical distinctions of diverse species; to others the well-ascertained development of varieties, within single recognised groups of a common descent, sufficiently accounts for the most marked diversities from a normal type of the one human species; and the New World presents all the requisites for such a development of variation from the primary type of man. 1 Hybridity of Animals, viewed in connexion with the Natural History of Mankind."-Types of Mankind, p. 409. |