4 On the Aborigines of Brazil. 



the nicer shades of expression. But this is also the case with 

 the negro, who has had an unvarying and unindividualised 

 countenance erroneously attributed to him by some authors. 



The same is equally true of their stature, of the colour 

 of their skin, and of their beard ; those characteristics ap- 

 pear in great variety, and are by no means bestowed so 

 uniformly on all, that one could say that nature had formed 

 them strictly after one model. We see Indians in Brazil, 

 large and small, slender and broad, copper-red, pale-yellow, 

 nay almost white, with very weak, or, if they do not con- 

 stantly extirpate them, tolerably strong beards, so that of 

 all the physical peculiarities attributed to this race, the hair 

 of the head smooth, straight, black and shining, growing 

 down low on the forehead, and the beard rare and always 

 soft, alone remain constant. (I have never observed hair 

 frizzly, brown 5 red, or blonde, nor a frizzly beard.) This cir- 

 cumstance must convince us, that the characteristics of the 

 Brazilian are not to be found in any exclusive mark, any 

 more than are those of other branches of the human family. 

 The races of men are indeed in the same condition in this 

 respect as the so-named natural families in the vegetable 

 world, which modern science endeavours to describe and to 

 fix, not by a few exclusive marks, but by a union of several 

 characteristics, a collective character. 



While, however, it is not any one prominent characteristic, 

 while it is the aggregate of all physical peculiarities, that 

 impresses us with the idea, that the aborigines of Brazil, and 

 of America in general, are a peculiar and independent race, 

 yet his first glance satisfies the mind of the traveller on the 

 subject, when he beholds the son of the wilderness in a 

 state of freedom standing naked in his wastes. The im- 

 pressions of so novel an apparition are then presented so 

 immediately to our observation, that our awakened attention 

 quickly embraces all its characteristics, and unites them 

 into a picture, the colouring of which no space of time can 



