of the American Indians. 333 



much of the features of a Turk. He applied to Mr. M'Latche 

 for a supply of blankets and other stores on credit, till he could 

 repay his old friend Mr. Spalding with buckskins, furs, and other 

 produce of their huntings. Mr. M. hesitated to assent for so 

 large a sum, without the Company's permission. The king, 

 agitated at his offended dignity, with great emotion and anger 

 exclaimed, " Do you presume to refuse ? you know who I am, 

 and what power I have ; but perhaps you do not know that I 

 could command the fiery shafts of the thunder now rolling to 

 lay you prostrate at my feet, and consume you and your 

 stores to ashes!" Good humour was resumed on credit being 

 granted for half the amount. He was a powerful chief over 

 an extensive and beautiful country in Florida. — (p. 255.) 



A young Seminole prince, above the middle stature, was 

 the most perfect human figure I ever saw ; graceful, familiar, 

 and dignified: he was in pursuit of a young fellow who had 

 fled with his favourite wife or concubine: he said, merrily, 

 that he would have the ears of both of them. This was their 

 legal punishment for adultery. (243.) The Seminoles speak 

 the Muscogulge and Stincard * tongues. (462) Bartram's 

 Travels. 



The Chactaws are called flat-heads ; all the males are placed 

 when born in a portable cradle or wooden case, hollowed to 

 receive the infant, who is fixed prostrate upon its back ; that 

 part where the head reposes is fashioned like a brick mould, 

 and a bag of sand is laid upon the forehead, which, by con- 

 tinual gentle compression, gives the head somewhat the form 

 of a brick from the temple upwards, and by these means they 

 have high and lofty foreheads, sloping off backwards f . They are 

 a hardy, subtle, intrepid, ingenious, and virtuous race. They erect 

 a scaffold twenty feet high in a grove J, upon which they lay 



• There is a race of Tartars so called by the Chinese. See Remarks on the 

 Notches J Conquest of Peru, p. 255. 



-j- The Spaniards prohibited these customs where their influence locally pre- 

 vailed ; but we find them still in existence in many places, and when more generally 

 practised, there were probably fantastical shapes that are no longer found. There 

 is no proof of such crushings of the skull and brain affecting the intellect. 



% This is still a custom with the Nisovian-Tungusians. — {Harris's Voy. vol. ii. 

 929.) A great difiBculty arises in the comparisons where the corresponding people 

 in Asia, like the Turks and Moguls, have adopted the Koran. 



APRIL— JULY, 1828, Z 



