190 J. H. Lefroy on the Indian Population of British America. 
the varieties of the human race that have ceased to exist within 
the same period! The Dodo was very common at the Isles de 
Bourbon two centuries ago; it was neglected, hunted down, 
and finally exterminated: and the Dutch seamen who made an 
easy prey of whole flocks, twenty or thirty at a time, in 1602, 
(the Dodo, page 15,) no more suspected that we should now be 
ransacking all the museums of Europe for scraps to elucidate its 
affinities, than the first settlers of Newfoundland did that we 
should also be seeking in vain for one relic of its aborigines. 
When happy and hospitable crowds welcomed the Spaniards to 
the shores of Hispaniola, those cavaliers little dreamt that in three 
centuries or less the numerous and warlike Caribs of that Island, 
like the Gauchos of the Canaries, would be extinct, as complete- 
ly so as the Architects of the Cyclopian remains of Italy, or the 
race that preceded Saxon, and Dane, and Celt, in the occupation 
of the British Isles. In half a century there will ‘be no trace of 
a native race in some of the British colonies in the east. The 
natives of Van Diemens Land, for example, who numbered 210 
in 1835, were reduced to 38 in 1848.* It even appears doubtful 
whether that most interesting of all savage races, the Maoris of 
New Zealand, with its wonderful force of character, and faculty 
for civilization, will not die out faster than it can conform to Its 
altered condition. Like those silent yet ceaseless operations of 
nature, which are wearing down, while we speak, the solid mat 
ter of every mountain chain, and substituting the luxuriant vege 
tation of the tropical coral reef for the barren waste of the sea; 
so, slowly and imperceptibly, are the great changes effected, by 
which one race supersedes another in the occupation of portion 
after portion of the globe, bringing higher qualities, a different 
ral and physical organization, to work out higher destimes, 
and fulfill higher ends of the same controlling Providence. 
These reflections have been suggested by the subject of the 
paper which I now propose to lay before this Society, containing _ 
the result of some enquiries I have made with a view to formin 
something like an authentic estimate of the number of the Indian 
race inhabiting the British possessions in America :—a portie 
only, it is true, of the whole race, yet one which by reason of the 
great extent of those possessions, is commonly regarded as a very 
important one. If, as I think it can be shown, that number 3S 
vastly smaller than most persons would snppose, and very rapidly 
diminishing, under circumstances which are nevertheless by "° 
means unfavorable to its preservation; then it must be admitted 
that the prospects for the race at large are anything but encourag- 
ing; that the time may not be far remote when posterity may be 
counting its last remnants, and wishing that we in our day had 
been more alive to the facts, and more industrious in setting UP 
* Our Antipodes, by Colonel G. Mundy, 1852, vol. ii. 
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