2 On the Aborigines of Brazil, 



cording to the prejudices and prevailing opinions of their 

 own country, and that they entertained no enlightened an- 

 thropological views regarding even the white races. The 

 literature of the rest of Europe, being equally under the 

 dominion of the doctrines of the middle ages, readily and 

 without any critical examination adopted their representa- 

 tions, which were either one-sided, or inaccurate in details, 

 and in consequence, they pretty generally maintain their 

 ground up to the present day. We may quote as a striking 

 example of the strange accounts of many points in the Na- 

 tural History of the American man, the book of DePauw,* 

 whose views, proceeding from his love of every thing strange 

 and unusual, are not even yet quite exploded, although 

 many other equally false pictures have, by this time, had 

 their exaggerations detected. 



As the spirit in which such enquiries are in these times 

 conducted, is very different, it may be of some importance 

 to give a true anthropological sketch of the Brazilian abori- 

 gines, especially as other nations of the American family 

 have been described by Von Humboldt, Rush, Morton, 

 D'Orbigny and others, with enlightened and unprejudiced 

 views. Such an investigation also acquires additional interest 

 from the fact, that the aborigines are being gradually drawn 

 more and more into the vortex of social and civil movement, 

 out of which an altered and new population of the Brazilian 

 kingdom must arise ; that in this movement they lose more 

 and more their original peculiarities, and at last, — such ap- 

 pears to be the law of the world, — will cease to exist at all, 

 as an independent member of the family of mankind. Every 

 sketch, therefore, which represents the physical condition of 

 the aborigines of Brazil at a particular epoch, must be re- 

 garded as an attempt to fix historically for that period, a 

 race fast hastening to dissolution. 



* Philosophische untersuchungen uber die Americaner. Berlin, 1769- 



