living by hunting and basket-making, I have been unable with any certainty to obtain their present numbers. But from their wandering and dissipated habits I feel certain they are decreasing, having heard of several deaths during the year. The fate of such nomades in an old settled district is inevitable. A few survivors will join themselves to other bands, and the Point Pelé Indians will permanently disappear from among the Chippewas of Upper Canada.

The returns of property, farming implements, and live stock, furnish no unfair test of the progress of the Indian settlements, and several of these have been referred to in illustration of their advancement in civilisation. In the case of the smaller or the less civilized bands, such property is necessarily on a diminished scale; but the supplementary notes appended to their tables of statistics occasionally afford curious insight into the workings of the semi-civilized Indian mind, while at other times they present a whimsical incongruity in the grouping of the common stock. In the census of the Mississagas of Chemong Lake, the public property belonging to the tribe is enumerated as "one log church, one waggon, one wood sleigh, one cow, three ploughs, and one harrow." The Snake Island Chippewas of Lake Simcoe "have, as public property, one frame school-house, occasionally used for public worship, three yoke of oxen, one plough, one harrow, two carts, one church-bell, and a grindstone." The Lake Skugog Indians, viewing with suspicion the designs of the Government agent in his too curious inquiries into their joint possessions, refused all information on the subject; while the Chippewas of Beausoleil Island, a shrewd band of industrious farmers, possessed of six yoke of oxen, fifteen cows, twenty head of young cattle, farming implements, and other useful property in proportion, communicated to the superintendent this

practical stroke of financial policy, which might supply a useful hint to the chancellor of larger exchequers: "The schoolmaster, Solomon James, has been absent, therefore no school has been kept; and the band have resolved in council, that they will not pay any salaries to chiefs or others, except the doctor, as it is so much money taken from the general funds without any corresponding benefit." Such sagacious political economists might be safely assumed no longer to stand in need of any departmental superintendence. From minute returns furnished to me from eight of the largest Chippewa reserves, it appears that out of 1839 Indians, 312 are of mixed blood; of the Mississagas, out of 530 Indians, 141 are of mixed blood; of 246 Potowattomies, only 20 are returned of mixed blood; and of 390 Delawares, only sixteen: though it can scarcely be doubted by any one familiar with the habits of frontier life, that all of those bands have taken up some considerable amount of white blood at an earlier date. In some of them the numbers are rapidly diminishing, under circumstances which could not fail to produce the same results on an equal number of white settlers; but in other cases increasing numbers are the healthful concomitant of industrious habits and accumulating property; and the Commissioners, in the Report of 1858, when urging the claims of the Indians to the permanent protection of the Imperial Government, add: "We cannot coincide in the opinion that the Indian service is an expiring one. The statistics in this Report militate strongly against the theory of a steady decline in the numbers of the Indians."

Such, then, are the illustrations which Canada affords of the transitional process which precedes the inevitable disappearance of the last remnants of its aborigines, including refugees from the vast tracts of extinct nations, now occupied by the restless industry of the United

States. The system of protection and pupilage under which, from the most generous motives, the Indian has hitherto been placed, has unquestionably been protracted until, in some cases at least, it has been prejudicial in its influence. It has precluded him from acquiring property, marrying on equal terms with the intruding race, and so transferring his offspring to the common ranks. While, however, we thus see that, in this transitional stage, a large proportion of the degenerate descendants of the aborigines absolutely perish in their premature contact with European civilisation, the half-breed of the frontier occupies a more favourable position. He mingles, in many cases, on a common footing with the settlers of the western clearings; his children grow up as members of the new community; and that inevitable process of amalgamation produces the same results there, which, it is manifest, are effacing every trait of Indian blood from the longest settled and most civilized of the survivors of the Indian nations of Canada.

The causes which have been referred to, as operating to prevent either the half-breed Indians or their posterity from being transferred in a condition of social equality to the common ranks of the New World's settlers, are neither irremediable nor of universal application. The honours of the Government House at Vancouver's Island are at present done by the daughters of an Indian mother; the hospitalities of more than one Canadian parsonage have been enjoyed by the author, where the hostess had the red blood of the New World in her veins ; and Mr. Lewis H. Morgan, in replying to inquiries on the extent of hybridity in the United States, thus concludes: "When the Indian acquires property, and with it education, and becomes permanently settled, then honourable marriage will commence, and with it a transfer of the posterity to our ranks. I hope to see that day

arrive; for I think we can absorb a large portion of this Indian blood, with an increase of physical health and strength, and no intellectual detriment." Whether it is calculated to prove beneficial or not, this process has not now to begin; though a change in the relative position of the civilized Indian with the occupants of the older settlements may tend greatly to increase it. The same process by which the world's old historic and unhistorie races were blended into elements out of which new nations sprung, is here once more at work. Already on the Red River, the Saskatchewan, the Columbia, and Fraser's River, on Vancouver's Island, and along the whole Indian frontiers both of the United States and British North America, the red and the white man meet on terms of greater equality; and the result of their intercourse is to create a half-breed population on the site of every new western clearing, totally apart from those of mixed blood who are reabsorbed into the native tribes. The statistics of the more civilized and settled bands of Indians in Upper and Lower Canada do not indicate that the intermixture of red and white blood, though there carried out under unfavourable circumstances, leads to degeneracy, sterility, or extinction; and the result of their intermingling in the inartificial habits of border life, is the transfer of a larger amount of red blood to the common stock than has hitherto, I believe, received any adequate recognition by those who have devoted attention to the comprehensive bearings of the inquiries which such phenomena of hybridity as have been discussed in this chapter involve.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE INTRUSIVE RACES.

Do races ever amalgamate? Does a mixed race exist? asks Dr. Knox:1 himself the native of that little islandworld where, favoured by its very insulation, Briton and Gael, Roman, Pict, and Scot, Saxon and Angle, Dane, Norman, and Frank, have for two thousand years been mingling their blood, and blending their institutions into a homogeneous unity. In seeking an answer to the great problem of modern science involved in such inquiries, the insular character of Britain presents some important elements tending to simplify the inquiry; but the archæological and historical data illustrative of the process by which the island race of Britain,

"This happy breed of men, this little world,” 2

has attained to its present development, become of secondary importance, when compared with the gigantic scale on which undesigned ethnological experiments have been wrought out on the continent of America. Admitting, for the sake of argument, all that is implied, not only in acknowledged Asiatic affinities of the Esquimaux; but the utmost that can be assumed in favour of an intrusive population by means of Phoenician, Celtiberian, ancient British, or Scandinavian colonizations, nevertheless it remains indisputable that the Western 1 The Races of Men, Lect. i.

2 Richard II. Act ii. Sc. i.