74 VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 



America, agriculture has become by coercion the business of the Indians ; and 

 among many of the independent hordes of both continents it is conjoined with 

 hunting as a means of subsistence. Again, in the West India Islands where there 

 was no game, the wants of an immense population were supplied in part by 

 agricultural labor, but perhaps in a still greater degree by cultivating the indi- 

 genous fruits. Many tribes resort wdth regularity to all these modes of subsistence, 

 according to the return of the seasons ; thus employing the spring of the year in 

 fishing, the summer in agriculture, the autumn and winter in hunting. 



The Cherokees, as we shall hereafter see, have become an agricultural nation 

 by the force of example ; but in Mexico there are tribes which have inhabited the 

 same localities which their ancestors possessed some centuries ago, and who lead 

 the peaceable life of cultivators of the soil, exempt from the contingencies to 

 which the hunting tribes are always exposed.^ 



Although the Americans have derived their horses from the Europeans, they 

 have managed them from the first with surprising dexterity. Among many 

 tribes in both Americas the fondness for these animals amounts to a passion: 

 whole tribes have assumed the equestrian character, so that they hunt and fight 

 exclusively on horseback; and the single province of Chaco, in Paraguay, contains 

 no less than twenty of these nations. They are also numerous throughout Brazil 

 and Patagonia, and in the region between the Mississippi river and the Rocky 

 Mountains. Yet strange as it may appear, there is scarcely an example among 

 the free Indians, of a horse being used for agricultural purposes.! 



The bold physical development of the American savage is accompanied by a 

 corresponding acuteness in the organs of sense. Although nature has done much, 

 education has contributed more to the perfection of these faculties. The constant 

 state of suspicion and alarm in which the Indian lives, compels him to observe a 

 sleepless vigilance. His senses are incessantly employed to preserve himself from 

 surprise and destruction, and to foil the stratagems of his enemy. It is said that 

 the Charibs of the Antilles could, by the scent alone, follow a man through the 

 woods with the same precision that a northern Indian traces another by his foot- 



* Humboldt, Polit. Essay on New Spain, B. II, chap. 6. 



t Among other modes of revenging themselves on the Spaniards, the Indians committed an 

 incessant pillage of their horses. Thus in the space of fifty years, says Dobrizhoffer,) an hundred 

 thousand of these animals were driven from the estates of the Spaniards by the Ablpc/nes of Chaco 

 alone ; and the same author adds, that no less than four thousand horses were frequently carried off 

 by the Paraguayan Indians in a single assault.—///^/, of the Mipones, III, p. 8. 



