1010 OP THE BRANCHES OF THE HUMAN FAMILY. 



present resemblances in physical characters to the higher Quadrumana. 

 This transformation has taken place, under the observation of eye-witnesses, 

 in the Koranas, a tribe of Hottentots well known to have been previously 

 the most advanced in all the improvements which belong to pastoral life; 

 for having been plundered by their neighbors, and driven out into the wil- 

 derness to subsist upon wild fruits, they have adopted the habits of the 

 Bushmen, and have become assimilated in every essential particular to that 

 miserable tribe. It appears, however, from the inquiries of Dr. Andrew 

 Smith, that this process of degradation has been in operation quite inde- 

 pendently of external agencies; nearly all the South African tribes who have 

 made any advances in civilization being surrounded by more barbarous 

 hordes, whose abodes are in the wildernesses of mountains and forests, and 

 who constantly recruit their numbers by such fugitives as crime and destitu- 

 tion may have driven from their own more honest and more thriving com- 

 munities; and these people vary their mode of speech designedly, and even 

 adopt new words, in order to make their meaning unintelligible to all but 

 the members of their own association. This has its complete parallel in the 

 very midst of our own or any other highly civilized community ; all our 

 large towns containing spots nearly as inaccessible to those unacquainted 

 with them, as are the rude caves or clefts of hills, or the burrows scooped 

 out of the level karroo, in which the wretched Bushman lies in wait for his 

 prey ; and these being tenanted by a people that have been well character- 

 ized as les classes dangereuses, which, as often as the arm of the law is paral- 

 yzed, issue forth from the unknown deserts within which they lurk, and 

 rival in their fierce indulgence of the most degrading passions, and in their 

 excesses of wanton cruelty, the most terrible exhibitions of barbarian in- 

 humanity. Such outcasts, in all nations, purposely adopt, like the Bush- 

 men, a "flash" language; and in their general character and usages there is 

 a most striking parallel. 1 



855. The American nations, taken collectively, form a group which ap- 

 pears to have existed as a separate family of nations from a very early 

 period in the world's history. They do not form, however, so distinct a va- 

 riety, in regard to physical characters, as some anatomists have endeavored 

 to prove; for, although certain peculiarities have been stated to exist in the 

 skulls of the aboriginal Americans, yet it is found on a more extensive ex- 

 amination, that these peculhrities are very limited in their extent, the 

 several nations spread over this vast continent differing from each other in 

 physical peculiarities as much as they do from those of the Old World, so that 

 no typical form can be made out among them. In regard to complexion, 

 again, it may be remarked, that, although the native Americans have been 

 commonly characterized as "red men," they are by no means invariably of 

 a red or coppery hue, some being as fair as many European nations, others 

 being yellow or brown, and others nearly, if not quite, as black as the Ne- 

 groes of Africa ; whilst, on the other hand, there are tribes equally red, and 

 perhaps more deserving that epithet, in Africa and Polynesia. Our ordi- 

 nary notion of the American races, having been chiefly founded upon the 

 characters of those tribes of "Indians" with whom European settlers first 

 came into contact, proves to be no more applicable to the inhabitants of the 

 Continent generally, than are the characters of the Negro to the population 

 of Africa as a whole ( 851). In spite of all this diversity of conformation, 

 it is believed that the structure of their languages affords a decided and 

 clearly marked evidence of relationship between them ( 845). Notwith- 



1 See London Labor and the London Poor, p. 2. 



