340 
distinction oe tribes. 
is observed in adidts. The idea that the natives may be 
whites tanned by the air and the sun, could never have 
occurred to a Spanish inhabitant of Quito, or of the banks 
of the Orinoco. In the north-east of America, on the con- 
trary, we meet with tribes among whom the children are 
white, and at the age of virility they acquire the bronze 
colour of the natives of Mexico and Peru. Miclnkinakoun, 
chief of the Mi, -unis, had his arms, and those parts of his 
: ody not exposed to the sun, almost white. This dillereuce 
of hue between the parts covered and not covered is never 
observed among the natives ot Peru and Mexico, eien in 
famili es who live much at their case, and remain almost con- 
stantly within doors. To the west of the Miamis, on the 
coast opposito to Asia, among the IColouches and Tchin- 
\itans* of Norfolk Sound, grown-up girls, when they have 
.ashed their skin, display the white hue of Europeans. 
This whiteness is found also, according to some accounts, 
among the mountaineers of Chile.t 
These facts are very remarkable, and contrary to the 
opinion so generally spread, of the extreme conformity of 
organization among the natives of America. If we div ide 
them into Esquimaux and non-Esquimaux, we readily 
admit that this classification is not more philosophical 
t han that of the ancients, who saw in the whole of the ha- 
bitable world only Celts and Scythians, Greeks, and Barba- 
rians. When, however, our purpose is to group numerous 
nations, we gain something by proceeding in the mode of 
exclusion. All we have sought to establish here is, that, 
in separating the whole race of Tsehongaz-Esquirnanx, there 
remain still, among the coppery-brown Americans, other 
races, the children of which are horn white, without our 
being able to prove, by going back as far as the history 
of the Conquest, that ’they have been mingled with Eu- 
ropean blood. This fact deserves to he cleared up by tra- 
* Between 54° and 58° of latitude. These white nations have been 
visited successively by Portlock, Marchand, Baranoff, and Davidoft. 
The Tchinkitans, or Sehinkit, are the inhabitants of the island of Sitka. 
Vater, Mithridates, vol. iii., p. 2. Marchand, Voyages, vol. ii. 
f Molina, Saggio sulT lstom Nat. del Chile, edit. 2, p. 293. May 
we believe the existence of those blue eyes of the Boroas ot Chile and 
Guayanas of Uruguay, represented to us as nations cf the race of Odin : 
Azora, Voyage, tom. ii, 
