446 HYBRIDITY AND ABSORPTION 



open war. In Canada sncli results have been averted, in part at 

 least, unquestionably from the care exercised alike by tbe Imperial 

 and Colonial authorities to protect the aborigines, as far as possible, 

 from injustice; and to delay action until their own concurrence in 

 the proposed change has been obtained. But it cannot be overlooked 

 that the small numbers usually embraced in each band, and their de- 

 pendent condition on their superintendents, have greatly facilitated 

 such transfers. 



In all this we see the curious conflict between the more generous 

 sentiments of progressive civilization, and the inevitable results which 

 its own triumphs are begetting. The collision and intermingling of 

 dissimilar races are no novelties in the history of the world. The 

 longer and more minutely the ethnology of Europe is studied it 

 becomes the more manifest that its modern nationalities are the 

 result of an intermingling of many dissimilar races of mankind. 

 The very geographical and political nomenclature is replete with 

 evidence of successive waves of population : Iberian, Celt, Roman, 

 Hun, Goth, Arab, and Turk ; which have followed one another in 

 ever renewing modification of the races of the Cld World. 



The theory of the modern anthropologist assigns for Europe an 

 aboriginal population, of which Rask assumed the Finn to be the 

 typical survivor. Before the first Aryan wave of population of Celtic 

 or other Indo-European type passed into Europe, it was already 

 occupied by its own rude aborigines, just as the same Indo-European 

 aggressors have found the New World in possession of native tribes, 

 wherever they forced their way. But it is not alone in ancient 

 sepulchral caves, barrows, or cairns, that the traces of the Allophylian 

 races of Europe are found. The Melanochroi, or dark whites, of 

 Professor Huxley's classification, are, as he says, " the Iberians and 

 ' black- Celts' of Western Europe ;" nor are they a distinct group, but 

 the result of the mixture of the Xanthochroi, or true white race — 

 pale-skinned, blue-eyed, and with abundant fair hair, — with an inferior 

 and primitive dark-skinned race, with long, prognathous skulls, which 

 Professor Huxley classes with one of the very lowest of existing 

 savage races, as the Australioid group. 



There was a time when the thinly-dispersed population of Pre- 

 historic Europe consisted of dark-skinned tribes, small in stature, and 

 with hair and eyes of corresponding hue. Not only are their modern 

 representatives to be found among the Laps, Finns, and the Iberians 



