blood? e.g., hair, form of head, of mouth, of cheek-bones, colour and character of eyes, and any other features? 3. Are those of partial Indian blood liable to any diseases which do not affect the whites or the pure Indians? Or, Are they more or less liable to such diseases? 4. Are the families descended from mixed parentage noticeably larger or smaller than those of whites or of Indians? 5. State any facts tending to prove or disprove, that the offspring descended from mixed white and Indian blood fails in a few generations. APPENDIX B.-Vol. ii. pp. 354, 418. ETHNOLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE: AMERICAN HALF-CASTES. IN all the departments of ethnology, the want of a generally recognised terminology is a serious impediment. Such words as race, stock, family, etc., are excluded, because their use in any strictly defined sense involves the affirmation of opinions most keenly disputed; and nearly the same objection lies against the adoption of such scientific terms of natural history as order, class, species, etc. In relation to hybridity, however somewhat has been already done by means of popular designations of the more noticeable varieties of mixed blood. Dr. Tschudi, after noticing the diverse characteristics of the pureblood population of European, Asiatic, African, and American descent to be met with in Peru, gives a list of the very varied degrees of mixed blood, with the names by which they are there designated. Of the term Creole, he observes, "The designation properly belongs to all the natives of America born of parents who have emigrated from the Old World." The children of pure-blood African parents are accordingly Creoles, as much as those of unmixed European blood. The Spaniards do not even limit the term Criollo to the human race, but apply it to all animals propagated in America of pure European parentage. They have, accordingly, Creole horses, bullocks, asses, poultry, etc. The following is Dr. Tschudi's list of half-castes, with a few additions from other sources :— The above deals with the results of hybridity with considerable minuteness. Nevertheless, it makes no distinction between Spanish, Portuguese, and English blood, and only once. discriminates among the equally strongly marked diversities of red and black blood. But we want a no less comprehensive series of distinctive names to indicate the offspring of intrusive races of pure blood. Lieber suggests the term Europidian for the American of pure European descent; but something much more minute is required to supply the want of definite terms constantly felt. The following suggests a series of terms, actual astronomical phenomena, and the changing seasons, to which they always bore an intimate relation. Seed-time and harvest are inevitably bound up with all national and religious festivals. We can trace back man's progress in the history of his calendars: in the "New Style" of England, with her lost eleven days, still religiously preserved in the unreformed calendar of Russia; in the French calendar of the Great Year, anno 14, when the Republic, with far-seeing forethought, enacted that A.R. 3600, A.R. 7200, and A.R. 10,800 shall not be leap years; while the very first year of this comprehensive system did not live out half its days! Backward we trace our way amid the conflicting dates consequent on the independent adoption of the Gregorian Calendar at various successive periods, from its first enactment by the Council of Trent in 1582, to its tardy adoption by Protestant Sweden in 1753. As we retrace our steps, we find the Church divided from the second to the fourth century, until another Council, that of Nice, determined for her the true period of keeping Easter. Then behind this, and before the Christian era, we come to the determination of the Julian Year, and the correction of the accumulated errors of previous divisions of time, in the year B.C. 47. The names of Ptolemy, Hipparchus, Meton, and Euctemon, carry us back by further steps; until in the Nile Valley we seem to reach the beginnings of calendars, and recognise, in the sacred Vague Year of the Egyptians, the first definite determination of solar time, with its unmistakable relations to a beginning of time for man himself. Astronomy has had its rise, alike in the Old World and the New, in elevated tropical table-lands, and fruitful valleys and plains, such as those through which the Euphrates and the Tigris roll their ample floods, or that strange river-valley which the Nile fertilizes with its annual overflow. In those favoured regions agriculture involves little toil, and the harvest ripens almost spontaneously for the reaper's sickle. There, also, flocks and herds were tended and trained for the use of man; and, in the pastoral life of their earliest communities, the herdsmen watched their flocks under the mild beaming stars, and acquired an intelligent familiarity with the constellations, and the planets that wander through the spangled dome of night. In the infancy of our race, men studied the stars, bringing to the aid of their human sympathies the fancies of the astrologer, to fill the void which their imperfect science failed to satisfy. The Chaldean shepherds, who had never travelled beyond the central plain of Asia, where in fancy we recognise the cradle of the human race, began the work of solving the mystery of the heavens; and what the Scottish shepherdastronomer of the eighteenth century, James Ferguson, accomplished, proves what lay in their power. "O honoured shepherd of our later days, Thee from the flocks, while thy untutored soul, Through all the splendid labyrinths of heaven, It was impossible that intelligent man could look forth, night after night, on the constellations, as they varied their place with the change from twilight to the dawn, and from moon to moon, and on the planets that moved in timely courses amid the twinkling stars, without discovering some of their relations to the seasons of the revolving year. But amid the same scenes of mild pastoral life, empires and populous cities first arose; forms of worship, and periodical festivals and sacrifices, marked the annual return of the seasons, when the firstlings of the flock, and, the first-fruits of the harvest-home, were 1 Eudosia, a Poem on the Universe, by Capel Lofft. offered by priests on national altars. The herdsman and the tiller of the soil traced to the warm beams of the bright god of day the sources of fertility in flock and field. They beheld the sun when it shined, and the moon walking in brightness, and their heart was secretly enticed, and their mouth kissed the hand.1 Alike in the tropical seats of primitive Asiatic empire, in the African Nile-Valley, and on the plateaus of the Andes, the early astronomers became Sabians, and worshipped the hosts of heaven, while striving to solve their mysterious relations to the earth. But if we follow them in their first division of solar time; and conceive of an annual festival, with sacrifices of the firstlings of the flock, such as we recognise in the most ancient religious rites, with a calendar founded on a year of 365 days: only a very few generations, at most, could pass away, before altogether irreconcilable and ever-increasing discrepancies would occur between the appointed festival and the actual season with which it was originally designed to harmonize. The lambs would be wanting for the burntoffering; the festival of harvesting would return while the wheat was still green in the ear, or the bright tassel of the maize was unformed; and the incensed god would be assumed to look down on his worshippers with wrath, and tardily to withhold the increase of their flocks and the yield of their early seed-time, until the calendar was readjusted, and the sacred and solar years were restored to harmony. Here, also, as we retrace our way, and seek to follow up the stream of time, the way-marks are no less continuous and definite. Names memorable among the intellectual leaders of the human race, stand out as symbols of the progress of knowledge. Leverrier, Rosse, Herschel, Newton, Huygens, and Galileo; Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Al Batani, and Copernicus; Ptolemy, Hip 1 Job xxxi. 26, 27. |