MIXTURE OF INDIAN BLOOD. 19 



active and the mind alive. And when we consider how 

 the soil is dependent for its productive capabilities on the 

 rocks from which it is derived, we can see how the dead 

 and sullen cliffs, with which the waves battle, along such 

 coasts as these, actually indicate to the instructed 

 observer the future character, intellectual and social, of 

 the people who do or shall inhabit the country, and the 

 kind of mental discipline they are destined to undergo, 

 in persuading or compelling it to support them. 



The element of race is one of the circumstances which 

 will here occur to the reader, as necessary to be taken 

 into account by the observer 5 and, in the present 

 instance, it happens to have a direct application of a 

 peculiar kind. When this country was held by the 

 French nation, they had numerous establishments along 

 the coast and islands, and possessed extensive fisheries. 

 The Micmac Indians were also numerous, and it was the 

 policy of the French Government to encourage inter 

 marriages between the two races. An admixture of 

 Indian blood, therefore, became very general among the 

 French families, and those who are familiar with the 

 Indian face profess to discover the Indian features among 

 the Acadian inhabitants of this north-eastern promontory. 

 It is not impossible that from this admixture a more 

 energetic breed may have sprung up, and that some of 

 the apparent superiority in condition of the people of 

 this coast, above those of purer blood at Petit Rocher, 

 may be due to this physiological cause.* It is equally 



* Among the Indians, also, indications of white blood may be seen. 

 I have in a previous chapter spoken of my visit to the Indian village 

 at the rnouth of the Tobique River, where I found them at morning 

 service in their Romish chapel. Among a knot of these men, as I 

 stood talking to them after service, I observed different shades of 

 colour. They were evidently of mixed blood. I pointed to these 

 diversities, and asked them how this one was so white, and that one 

 so red. They could not tell, they said ; and certainly they looked 

 unconscious. The Indian blood is much mixed wherever the French 

 have settled. They did not disdain Indian wives; and it was sometimes 



