xliv INTRODUCTION. 



merable animal species, and amongst these Human Beings, 

 apparently as proper to the regions where they are found as 

 those of Europe, Africa, and Asia, are to the Eastern hemi- 

 sphere. But America, extending over all the varieties of 

 climates in which living creatures can exist, its human in- 

 habitants present great diversities of form and aspect, 

 though conforming to a general order of characters, which 

 may be termed American. The great distinction of the in- 

 habitants is between those on either side of the elevated 

 countries on the Caribbean Sea. The northern races gene- 

 rally resemble the Eastern Asiatics more than they resemble 

 the other families of mankind. The forehead is sloping, and 

 the middle part of the cranium elevated, the iricles are dark, 

 the face is broad across the cheeks, the mouth is wide, the 

 lips are thick, the ears very large. The colour of the skin tends 

 more or less to a copper-red, and the hair of the head is black, 

 straight, and long. The southern races, again, exhibit cha- 

 racters proper to their own region. If we compare the wild 

 warrior of the Canadian forests with the feeble remnant of 

 the misused Peruvian, the black Indian of the Caribbean 

 Sea, the savage horseman of Paraguay, or the athletic hun- 

 ter of Patagonia, we find differences as great as are employed 

 to distinguish the inhabitants of the Caucasus from the Kal- 

 muks of Eastern Asia ; but there is a relation between even 

 the most distant tribes, as in the copper hue of the skin, the 

 darkness of the eye, the lankness of the hair, which connects 

 the American nations by a certain general similitude. There 

 were in early times, it may be believed, partial mixtures 

 with Asiatic, Polynesian, and even perhaps African colo- 

 nists, yet we have no more reason to question that the 

 Americans were, from the earliest distribution of animal 

 species, as proper to the regions which they inhabited, as the 

 Negroes to the intertropical countries of Africa, or the Cau- 

 casians, so called, to Western Asia. Most of them had not 

 advanced beyond the hunter state, though there are traces 

 in the country of anterior inhabitants, and though empires 



