12 DISPLACEMENT AND EXTINCTION OF EACES. 



bling from various points both of the American and the Hudson's 

 Bay territories, on one of the large islands in the Paver Ste. Marie, 

 and while waiting at the Sault a considerable body of them returned, 

 passing up in their canoes. Having entered into conversation with 

 an intelligent American Methodist missionary, who accompanied 

 them, I questioned him as to the amount of intermarriage or inter- 

 course that took place between the Indians and the whites, and its 

 probable effects in producing a permanent new type resulting from 

 the mixture of the two very dissimilar races. His reply was : " Look 

 about you at this moment, comparatively few of these onlookers have 

 not Indian blood in their veins ;" and such I discovered to be the 

 case, as my eye grew more familiar with the traces of Indian blood. 

 At all the white settlements near those of the Indians, the evidence 

 of admixture was abundant, from the pure half-breed to the slightly 

 marked remoter descendant of Indian maternity, discoverable only by 

 the straight black hair, and a singular watery glaze in the eye, not 

 unlike that of the English Gypsey. The Indian may remain uncivi- 

 lized, and perish before the advance of civilization, which brings for 

 him only vice, famine, and disease, in its train ; but such is not the 

 case with the mixed race of a white paternity. Much, perhaps all of 

 their aptitude for civilization may come by their European heritage 

 of blood, but the Indian element survives even when the all-predomi- 

 nating Anglo-Saxon vitality has effaced its physical manifestations. 



In this manner the ancient Celtic element of European ethnology 

 doubtless still asserts no inconsiderable influence. The Briton of 

 Wales retains nearly all his early characteristics ; his philological and 

 physiological peculiarities are alike unchanged. The Cornish Briton 

 on the contrary retains only the last of these, his language having 

 ceased to be a living tongue ; while the continental Gaul has not only 

 resigned his language for a neo-latin tongue, but he has so inter- 

 mingled his blood with Roman, Erank, Norman, Iberian, and Arab, 

 that he is no longer looked upon, like the Welshman or Irish Galwc- 

 gian, as a pure Celt. Yet few, if any, doubt the predominance of the 

 Celtic element, or hesitate to trace to that source, many of the 

 characteristic peculiarities wherein the Frenchman diil'ers so essentially 

 either from the continental German or t i- Saxon. In a like 



manner, though doubtless in a much less marked degree, it may be 

 that the Bed Indian of America may leave some permanent traces of 

 his intermixture with that race by whom he is being displaced, proving 

 here also that absorption, and not absolute extirpation, plays a part, 

 at least, in the extinction of modern as well as primitive aboriginal 

 races, when left to the operation of natural causes. 



