South American Indians. 315 



CHAPTER XXII. 



Life around the Great River. — Origin of the Red Man. — General Character- 

 istics of the Amazonian Indians. — Their Languages, Costumes, and Hab- 

 itations. — Principal Tribes. — Mixed Breeds. — Brazilians and Brazil. 



We come now to the genus Homo. Man makes a veiy 

 insignificant figure in the vast solitudes of the Amazon. 

 Between Manaos and Para, the most densely-peopled part 

 of the valley, there is only one man to every four square 

 miles ; and the native race takes a low place in the scale of 

 humanity. As the western continent is geologically more 

 primitive than the eastern, and as the brute creation is also 

 inferior in rank, so the American man, in point of prog- 

 ress, seems to stand in the rear of the Old World races. 

 Both the geology and zoology of the continent were arrest- 

 ed in their development. Yegetable life alone has been 

 favored. " The aboriginal American (wrote Yon Martins) 

 is at once in the incapacity of infancy and unj)liancy of 

 old age ; he unites the opposite poles of intellectual life.""^ 



We ^vill not touch the debatable ground of the red man's 

 origin, nor inquire whether he is the last remains of a peo- 

 ple once high in civilization. But we are tempted to ex- 

 press the full belief that tropical America is not his " cen- 

 tre of creation." He is not the true child of the tropics ; 

 and he lives as a stranger, far less fitted for its climate than 



* "I think I discover in the Americans (said Humboldt) the descendants 

 of a race which, early separated from the rest of mankind, has followed up 

 for s^ series of years a peculiar road in the unfolding of its intellectual facid- 

 ties and its tendency toward civilization." The South American Indian 

 seems to have a natural aptitude for the arts of civilized life not found in the 

 red man of our continent. 



