EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 243 



to have been, but only a kind of Mandan tribe, which chanced 

 to have made its way farther along the path of civilization and 

 the arts, before the barbarians broke in upon it ? The flame 

 essayed to rise in many parts of the earth ; but there were 

 strong agencies working against it, and down it accordingly 

 went, times without number ; yet there was always a vitality 

 in it, nevertheless, and a tendency to progress, and at length 

 it seems to have attained a strength against which the powers 

 of barbarism can never more prevail. The state of our know- 

 ledge of uncivilized nations makes us liable to error on this 

 subject. They are generally supposed to be all at one point in 

 barbarism, which is far from being the case, for in the midst of 

 every great region of uncivilized men, such as North America, 

 there are nations partially refined. The Jolofs, Mandingoes, 

 and Kafirs, are African examples, where a natural and inde- 

 pendent origin for the improvement which exists is as unavoid- 

 ably to be presumed as in the case of the Mandans. 1 We find 



1 The view of civilization here controverted is to be found in Arch- 

 bishop Whately's Lectures on Political Economy. In Additions to the 

 fifth edition of his Grace's Elements of Rhetoric, the fact respecting 

 the Mandans is controverted, on the grounds that there is no proof of 

 their originally having been savages, or of the same race with the other 

 North Americans, or of their civilization not having been introduced 

 from without. Mr. Catlin is also represented as stating in private that 

 he presumed the Mandans, from their external appearance, to be a dis- 

 tinct race. Their distinctness and the independent origin of the civi- 

 lization I am represented as having assumed, contrary to all logical 

 science. I would reply briefly, that censure on the last point, were it 

 just, would come ill from one who is willing wholly to assume, in this 

 case, the opposite position. It is not just, however ; for were the 

 Mandans, as his Grace supposes, the remains of a civilized people, in- 

 troduced from without, they ought to have had a distinct language, 

 which is not pretended. External peculiarities are precisely those which 

 civilization modifies, and they therefore tell not in the case. Then as to 

 Mr. Catlin' s privately expressed admission, it is sufficient to refer to his 

 own words, quoted at a later portion of my text, where he expressly 

 attributes the improvement of the Mandans to the external circumstances 

 to which I in part trace all civilization. Unprompted, unprejudiced, 

 untampered-with testimony, such as we find in Mr. Catlin's book, seems 

 to me worth considerably more than anything on the opposite side of a 

 merely theoretical nature. 



Sir C. Lyell, in his Travels in North America, speaking of the original 

 people of America, conveys views in which I concur. 



"Although," he says, "the various tribes remained in general as 

 stationary in all matters requiring intellectual effort, as in their nautical 

 contrivances, we behold with surprise certain points, of which Mexico 

 was the most remarkable, where an indigenous and peculiar civilization 

 had been developed, and had reached a high degree of perfection. How- 



