OF THE RED INDIAN RACE. 463 



absorbed into the new generations, but not without leaving some 

 traces on the predominant race, and, perhajis, helping to adapt it to 

 its new home. 



It has been a favourite idea with some physiologists that in the 

 undoubted development of something like an essentially distinct 

 Anglo-American type of man, there is a certain appi-oximation to the 

 Indian type. Dr. Carpenter, in his " Essay on the Varieties of Man- 

 kind," lays claim to origmality in the idea " that the conformation of 

 the cranium seems to have imdergone a certain amount of alteration, 

 even in the Anglo-Saxon race of the United States, which assimilates 

 it in some degree to that of the aboriginal inhabitants." This he 

 dwells on in some detail, and arrives at what he seems to regard as 

 an indisputable conchision, that the peculiar American jihysiognomy 

 to which he adverts presents a transition, however slight, toward that 

 of the North-Ameiican Indian. I doubt if such an idea would ever 

 have occurred to a physiologist of Canada, or of N"ew England, to 

 whom abundant opportunities for comparing the Indian and Anglo- 

 American features, and of noting the actual transitional forms between 

 the two, are accessible. But if such examples can be clearly recog- 

 nized, they may be assigned with more probability to a reverting 

 to some Indian ancestress whose blood is transmitted to a late 

 descendant. 



The European colonist is, in the strictest sense of the term, an 

 intruder in the ISTew World. He can scarcely plead a higher law of 

 right, in the dispossession of the Aborigines, than that of the strongest. 

 It is his " to take who has the power, and to keep who can." His 

 higher plea is, the better account to which he can turn the wilderness 

 of the New World. Yet the thoughtful mind is not wholly satisfied 

 even by such a plea, in defence of the utter extirpation of the abori- 

 ginal population of a whole continent, in the interest of intruders 

 from the Old World. It is, therefore, not merely an interesting, but 

 a satisfactery reflection, that here also, as in modern nationalities of 

 Europe, its ancient and prehistoric races will survive under new 

 forms to share in the novel phases of the coming time. 



To this, I conceive, we must look as the inevitable and by no 

 means unsatisfactory solution of a question which has troubled the 

 minds of many philanthropists. Among the native races with which 

 European colonization has brought us into contact, in Africa, Aus- 

 tralia, and elsewhere, there are many too low in the scale of humanity 



