630 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



three years. Lewis Morgan naturalized himself as an Iroquois in 

 order to study the social structure of that people. Parkman quali- 

 fied himself to be the historian of the same dying race by the rough 

 initiation of actual residence, and the story of miscegenation that 

 he tells seems to borrow some of its fascination from observation at 

 close quarters. There were remains of it when he wrote (in 1851), 

 but its flourishing days belong to a full century earlier. Then the 

 French immigrants gave prophetic confirmation of Bismarck's mot, 

 " Scratch a Frenchman, and you come upon the red Indian." Red 

 Indians they became. " The manners of savages," wrote one of them, 

 " are perfectly agreeable to my palate." They were adopted mem- 

 bers of Indian tribes, had squaws and reared a dusky brood, dec- 

 orated and painted, danced, hunted, and took scalps; even Count 

 Frontenac, Governor of Canada, plumed and painted, danced and 

 yelled. Naturally, they sank to the moral level of their associates, 

 caught their habits, imbibed their prejudices, drank in their supersti- 

 tions. Frontenac burned Iroquois prisoners; Lovigny tortured Iro- 

 quois ambassadors to death. More tragical still, the fugitives from 

 civilization, or those who had been captured by Indians, when found 

 and brought back, sat sullen and angry, and escaped when they could 

 to the free forest life. Women who had been carried off from Kew 

 England villages in childhood were recovered and feted, but soon 

 fled to their warriors and Indian children. When we condemn the 

 savages who have reverted to their old life after being inured to 

 civilized ways we forget the hundreds of whites who have made a far 

 greater drop. The deterioration resembles that of horses, cattle, and 

 other domesticated animals that have been turned adrift or broken 

 loose in a wild country. Its degree differs in different races. The 

 instinctive repugnance which makes it so hard for an Englishman to 

 govern s^nnpathetically any race but his own is here his safeguard. 

 He intermarries or worse, but does not so greatly sink. He either 

 disentangles himself or raises his partner to his own level. His house- 

 hold then becomes a normal English home. 



As the savage eats the heart of his slain enemy to acquire his 

 courage, have we miscegenated the lower races unto ourselves to 

 gain something of the unique qualities they possess? It is impossible 

 that the infiltration of their blood into that of a colony, weeded out as 

 it soon is, should not proportionately affect the sentiments, beliefs, 

 and actions of the young community. There are even writers who 

 maintain that there can be no real interracial influence without inter- 

 mixture. What part has the alien element played in deeply Indian- 

 ized Lower Canada? How much of his genius does the naturalist, 

 psychologist, and novelist with whom Canada dowered England owe 

 to the strain of Indian blood in him? The Spanish- American, Gar- 



