230 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



than females disposes of the theory that war is the cause of the de- 

 crease ; and infanticide, which chiefly affected the females, has ceased 

 since 1836. Small-pox has now visited the island ; measles may be 

 said to be the only epidemic disease brought by the Europeans, and 

 this did not appear till 1853. There is very little intoxication, and the 

 " vice-diseases " are said to take a very mild type. Finally, that some 

 radical cause is in operation is shown by the fact that actually fewer 

 children are born than before the colonization of the island, and that, 

 while the half-breed families are large, the native families are small, 

 and the infantile mortality is very great. In view of the wide extent 

 of country over which this process is going on, the author sees nothing 

 to expect but the speedy extinction of the race. 



The history of the American Indians should obviously not be 

 omitted in this consideration. Unfortunately, figures here are unre- 

 liable. Estimate necessarily replaced enumeration regarding the abo- 

 riginal population when the whites landed, and has continued in large 

 degree to do so since. Doubtless terror and perhaps vain-glory added 

 something to the report of the numbers of the savages whom our an- 

 cestors fought and vanquished. But we have some ground for a com- 

 parative estimate of the native population. In 1822 a census was taken 

 by the Government of the Indians east of the Mississippi, with reference 

 to the removal of them which was then contemplated. According to 

 this enumeration, they were 120,000. Bancroft's estimate of the Eastern 

 Indians in the first half of the seventeenth century is 180,000. This 

 would indicate a diminution of thirty-three per cent in two centuries, 

 during which the Indians had been more or less in contact with the 

 whites, and during the latter part of which they had doubtless begun 

 to modify their way of living in accordance with the customs of their 

 neighbors. It was about this time that the policy of removal to reser- 

 vations beyond the Mississippi was inaugurated. A few of the Chero- 

 kees had accepted a reservation in Arkansas in 1817, but it was not 

 till 1828 that the majority of them left Georgia, and the emigration 

 continued through the following ten years. In 1838, 81,000 had been 

 removed, 39,000 remaining east of the Mississippi.* In 1853 only 

 18,000 remained in their original locality, and 60,000 out of a total 

 of 90,000 removed Indians had been settled in the Indian Territory. 



Now, according to the report of the Indian Commissioner for 1879, 

 the population of the five so-called civilized tribes in that Territory, 

 viz., the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, was 

 60,000 ; and the remaining reservations in the same Territory, some six 

 or seven in number, include several thousands, so that the civilized 

 tribes must have undergone considerable increase. Colonel Otis esti- 

 mates that the Cherokee tribe has doubled in the last century. f He 



* Vide " The Indian Question," by Elwell S. Otis, lieutenant-colonel United States 

 Army, chapter i. 

 f Ibid., p. 44. 



