CANADA, A TYPICAL EACE OF AMEBIC AN ABOEIGINES. 73 



its earliest aboriginal races. But we look in vain tor evidence of au extinct native civili- 

 zation. However far back the presence of Man in the new world may be traced, throtigb- 

 out the Northern continent, at least, he seems never to have attained to any higher 

 stage than what is indicated by such evidences of settled occupation as were shown in 

 the palisaded Indian town of Hochelaga ; or at most, in the ancient settlements of the 

 Ohio valley. Everywhere the agriculturist only disturbs the graves of the savage hunter. 

 The earthworks of the Mound-Builders, and still more their configuration, are indeed 

 suggestive of a people in a condition analogous to that of the ancient populace of Egypt 

 or Assyria, toiling under the direction of an overruling caste, and working out intellect- 

 ual conceptions of which they themselves were incapable. Yet, even in their case, this 

 inference finds no confirmation from the contents of their mounds or earthworks. They 

 disclose only implements of bone, flint and stone, with some equally rude copper tools, 

 hammered into shape without the use of fire. Working in the metals appears to have 

 been confined to the southern continent ; or, at least, never to have found its way north- 

 ward of the Mexican plateau. Nothing but the scïilptured tobacco-pipe, or the better- 

 fashioned pottery, gives the slightest hint of progress beyond the first infantile stage of 

 the tool-maker. 



But whatever may have been the source of sijecial skill among the old agricultural 

 occupants of the Ohio valley, their Iroquois supjilanters borrowed from them no artistic 

 aptitude. No remains of its primitive occupants give the slightest hint that the 

 aborigines of Canada, or of the country immediately to the south of the St. Lawrence, 

 derived any knowledge from the old race so curiously skilled in the construction of 

 geometrical earthworks. Any native burial-mounds or embankments are on a small 

 scale, betraying no more than the simplest operations of a people whose tools were mere 

 flint hoes, and horn or wooden picks and shovels. Wherever evidence is found of true 

 working in metals, as distinct from the cold-hammered native copper, as in the iron 

 tomahawk, the copper kettles, and silver crosses, recovered from time to time from Indian 

 graves, their European origin is indisputable. Small silver buckles of native workman- 

 ship are indeed common in their graves ; for a metallic currency was so unintelligible to 

 them that this was the use to which they most frequently turned French or English 

 silver coinage. 



But notwithstanding the general correspondence in arts, habits, and conditions of life, 

 among the forest and prairie tribes of North America, their distinctive classification into 

 diverse dolichocephalic and brachycephalic types j)oints to diversity of origin and a 

 mingling of several races. So far as the native races of Canada are considered, it has 

 been shown that all belong to the dolichocephalic type. The Alligéwi, or Mound- 

 Builders, on the contrary, were a strongly marked brachycephalic race ; and the bitter 

 antagonism between the two, which ended in the utter ruin of the latter, may have 

 been originally due to race distinctions such as have frec[uently been the soiirce of 

 implacable strife. 



The short globular head-form, which, in the famous Scioto-mound skull, is shown in 

 a strongly marked typical example with the longitudinal and parietal diameters nearly 

 equal, appears to be common among the southern tribes, such as the Osages, Ottoes, 

 Missouries, Shawnoes, Cherokees, Seminoles, Uchees, Savannahs, Catawbas, Yamasees, 



Sec. II., 1884. 10. 



