38 DR. DANIEL WILSON ON 
successfully maintains the battle for life under conditions which determine to a large 
extent the character of his ingenious arts and manufacture. Immediately to the south are 
found the nomad tribes of forest and prairie, with their teepees ot Buffalo skin, or their 
birch-bark wigwams and canoes: the wandering hunter-tribes of the great North-west : 
type of the red Indian ofthe whole northern continent. The Ohio and Mississippi valleys 
abound with earthworks and other remains of the vanished race of the Mound-Builders : 
of old the settled dwellers in fortified towns, agriculturalists, ingenious potters, devoted 
to the use of tobacco, expending laborious art on their sculptured pipes, and with some 
exceptionally curious skill in practical geometry ; yet, they too, ignorant of almost the very 
rudiments of metallurgy, and only in the first stage of the organised life of a settled com- 
munity. The modifying influences of circumstances must be recognized in the migratory 
or settled habits of different tribes. The Eskimos are of necessity hunters and fishers, yet 
they are not, strictly speaking, nomads. In summer they live in tents, constantly moving 
from place to place, as the exigencies of the reindeer-hunting, seal-hunting, or fishing 
impel them. But they generally winter in the same place for successive generations, and 
manifest as strong an attachment to their native home as the dwellers in more favoured 
lands. Their dwelling-houses accommodate from three or four to ten families; and the same 
tendency to gather in communities under one roof is worthy of notice wherever the wan- 
dering tribes settle even temporarily. I have a drawing, made by me in 1866, ofa large birch- 
bark dwelling which stood among a group of ordinary wigwams on the banks of the Kami- 
nistiquia, accommodating several families of a band of Chippaways, who had come from the 
far west to trade their furs with the Hudson’s Bay factorthere. The Haidahs, the Chinooks, 
the Nootkas, the Columbian and other Indian tribes to the west of the Rocky Mountains, 
all use temporary tents or huts in their frequent summer wanderings ; but their permanent 
dwellings are huge structures sufficient to accommodate many families, and sometimes 
the whole tribe. They are constructed of logs or split planks, and in some cases—as 
among the Haidahs of Queen Charlotte Islands,—elaborately decorated with carving and 
painting. 
The gregarious habits thus manifested by many wandering tribes, whenever circum- 
stances admit of their settling down in any permanent home, may be due solely to the 
economy of labour which experience has taught them in the construction of one common 
dwelling, instead of the multiplication of single huts or lodges. But far to the south- 
ward are the ancient pueblos, the casas grandes, the cliff dwellings, of a race not yet 
extinct: timid, unaggressive, living wholly on the defensive, gathered in large communi- 
ties like ants or bees; industrious, frugal, and manifesting ingenious skill in their pottery 
and other useful arts; but, they too, in no greatly advanced stage of civilization. Still 
farther to the south, we come at length to the seats of an undoubted native American 
civilization. The comparative isolation of Central America, and the character of its 
climate and productions, all favoured a more settled life; with, as its genuine results, its 
architecture, sculpture, metallurgy, hieroglyphies, writing, and all else which gives so strik- 
ing a character to the remains of the Central American nations. But great as is their con- 
trast with the wild tribes of the continent, the highest phases of native American civili- 
zation will not compare with the arts of Egypt, in centuries before Cadmus taught letters 
to the rude shepherds of Attica; or the wolf still suckled her cubs on the Palatine hill. 
If this is a correct reading of American archeology, its bearings are significant in refer- 
