Comparative Table of Numerals.
| Hochelaga. | Huron. | |||
| (Cartier.) | (Lorette.) | Wyandot. | Mohawk. | |
| 1 | segada} | |||
| secata} | skāt | scat | unska | |
| 2 | tigneny} | |||
| tignem } | tendi | tendee | dekenih | |
| 3 | asche | chin | shaight | ahsunh |
| 4 | honnacon | ndak | andaght | kayerih |
| 5 | ouiscon | wisch | weeish | wisk |
| 6 | indahir | wahia | waushau | yayak |
| 7 | ayaga | tsotaré | sootaie | jadah |
| 8 | adigue | ateré | autarai | sadekonh |
| 9 | madellon | entson | aintru | tyodonh |
| 10 | assem | asen | aughsagh | oyerih |
| 11 | ... | asenskatiskaré | assan escate escarhet | unskayawenreh |
| 12 | ... | asentenditiskaré | asanteni escarhet | dekenihyawenreh |
| 13 | ... | āsenachinskaré | ... | ahsunhyawenreh |
| 14 | ... | asendakskaré | ... | kayerihyawenreh |
| 15 | ... | asenwischskaré | ... | wiskyawenreh |
| 16 | ... | asenwahiaskaré | ... | yayakyawenreh |
| 17 | ... | asentsotaréskaré | ... | jadahyawenreh |
| 18 | ... | asenateréskaré | ... | sadekonhyawenreh |
| 19 | ... | asenentsonskaré | ... | tyodonhyawenreh |
| 20 | ... | tendi eouasen | tendeitawaughsa | dewasunh |
| 30 | ... | achink iouasen | ... | ahsunhniwasunh |
| 100 | ... | enniot iouasen | scutemaingarwe | unskadewennyaweh |
| 1000 | ... | asenate ouendiaré | assen attenoignauoy | oyerih- |
| nadewennyaweh | ||||
are seen in the universality of one series of names throughout the whole ancient and modern Aryan languages of Asia and Europe. But the Basque numerals bear little or no resemblance to either, unless such can be traced in the bi, “two,” and the sei, “six,” as in the assem, “ten” (decem), of the old Hochelaga, the ahsen of the later Wyandots. The ehun of the Basque has also its remote, and probably accidental resemblance; but the milla, “one thousand,” is certainly borrowed, and serves to show that the higher numerals, with the evidence they afford of advancing civilisation, were the result of intrusive Aryan influences in the natives of the Iberian peninsula. With the growing tendency to turn to the prehistoric Iberians of Europe for one possible key to the origin of the races and languages of America, it is well to keep this test in view for comparison with the widely varying native numerals. But the correspondence is slight, even with probable Turanian congeners. One Biscayan form of “three,” hirun, is not unlike the Magyar harom; while the eyg, “one,” of the latter, seems to find its counterpart in the inseparable particle that transforms the Basque radical ham, “ten,” into the hamaika, “eleven.” But such fragmentary traces are in striking contrast to the radical agreement of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic numerals. Mr. Hale has drawn my attention to the curious manner in which the names of the first five Hochelaga numerals in Cartier’s list are contracted and strengthened in the modern Wyandot; and some of the modifications in the Iroquois dialects are no less interesting. Secata, the Hochelaga “one,” survives in the Onondaga skadah, while it becomes skat in the modern Huron, the Cayuga, and the Seneca. But in the compounded form of the Wyandot “one hundred,” skatamendjawe, as in the Onondaga skadahdewennyachweh, the terminal a reappears. Tigneny, the old form of “two,” is abridged and strengthened to tendi; asche, “three” (originally, in all probability, aschen, or, as still in use by the Hurons of Lorette, achin), survives as ahsunh or ahsenh in nearly all the Iroquois dialects, including the Tuscarora. In the Nottoway it is still discernible in the modified arsa. The exceptions are the Seneca, where it becomes sen, while one Wyandot form is shenk; which reappears in the Seneca compounded form of “thirty,” shenkwashen. Honnacon, “four,” loses both its initial and terminal syllables, and becomes dak in the Wyandot, and keih or kei, an abbreviation of the Mohawk kayerih, in the Cayuga and the Seneca dialects. The ancient form of “five,” ouiscon, has partially survived in the Huron ouisch. It becomes wisk, whisk, wish, or (in the Seneca) wis, in all the Iroquois dialects,—the Wyandot and Cayuga once more agreeing in form. The ayaga, “seven,” of the old Hochelaga, nearly resembles the jadah of several of the Iroquois dialects, as in the Cayuga jadak, in the Tuscarora janah, and in the Nottoway oyag; whereas in the Wyandot it is tsotaré. The adigue, “eight,” in its oldest form is sadekonh in the Mohawk, and dekrunh in the Cayuga; with the substitution of the l for r it becomes deklonh in the Oneida; and after changing to tekion in the Seneca, and nagronh in the Tuscarora, it reappears in the Nottoway as dekra. The ancient madellon, “nine,” curiously survives in abridged form, with the substitute for the labial, in the Oneida wadlonh and the Onondaga wadonh, while one Wyandot form is entron, and that of the Hurons of Lorette entson. In the Hochelaga assem, “ten,” we have the old form which is perpetuated in the Wyandot ahsen, the Onondaga and Cayuga wasenh, the Tuscarora wasunh, and the Nottoway washa; while the Mohawk and the Oneida have the diverse oyerih, or oyelih, with the characteristic change of r into l. The form of the Mohawk for “one thousand,” oyerihnadewunnyaweh, is an interesting illustration of the progressive development of numbers. Na is probably a contraction of nikonh, “of them,” or “of it,”—the whole reading “of them ten hundred.”
In comparing the languages of the different members of the Iroquois confederacy with the Wyandot or Huron, some of the facts already noted in the history of the former have to be kept in view. Two and a half centuries have transpired since the three western nations of the confederacy, the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas received great additions to their numbers by the successive adoption of Attiwendaronk, Huron, and Erie captives, while the Caniengas, or Mohawks, and the Oneidas remained unaffected by such intrusions. There is direct evidence that the Onondaga language has undergone great change; as a Jesuit dictionary of the seventeenth century exists which shows a much nearer resemblance between the Mohawk and Onondaga languages at that date than now appears. Allowance must be made for similar changes affecting the Hurons in their enforced migration from the St. Lawrence to their later homes. Here, as in so many other instances, it becomes interesting to note how the language of a people reflects its history.
In tracing out slighter and more remote resemblances, such as may be discerned on a close scrutiny, where the variation between the Hochelaga and the modern Wyandot numerals is widest, the different sources of change have to be kept in view. In all such comparisons, moreover, allowance must be made for the phonetic reproduction of unfamiliar words learned solely by ear, as well as for the peculiar representation of the nasal sounds in their reduction to writing by a French or English transcriber.
The tradition, mentioned by Dooyentate, of Senecas and Wyandots living in friendly contiguity on the Island of Montreal in the sixteenth century, naturally suggests the probability that their dialects did not greatly differ. Certain noticeable resemblances between the Seneca and the Wyandot numerals have been noted above, but it is only their modern forms that are thus open to comparison; and in the process of phonetic decay the Seneca has suffered the greatest change. But after making every allowance for modifications wrought by time, by adoption of strangers into the tribe, and other internal sources of change, as well as for the imperfection of Cartier’s renderings of the Hochelaga tongue, and for subsequent errors of transcribers and printers, there still remains satisfactory evidence of relationship between nearly half of Cartier’s vocabulary and the corresponding words of the Wyandot tongue. A comparison has been made between the Hochelaga numerals and those of the Wyandots of Anderdon. In the comparative table of numerals given on page [292], I have placed alongside of the old Hochelaga series derived from Cartier’s lists those now in use among the Hurons of Lorette, as supplied to me by M. Paul Picard, the son of the late Huron chief. In the third column another version of the Wyandot numerals is given, from Gallatin’s comparative vocabulary. It is derived from different sources, including the United States War Department; and therefore, no doubt, illustrates the changes which the language has undergone among the Wyandots on their remote Texas reserve. Gallatin also gives another version of Huron numerals derived from Sagard. It will be seen that M. Picard used the t as in Cartier’s lists, and in that of the southern Wyandots, where the d is employed in others, except in the Nottoway numerals, where the use of both is, no doubt, due to the English transcriber. In comparing the different lists, this variation in orthography and also the interchangeable k and g have to be kept in view. Thus the Cayuga has dekrunh, in the Oneida dekelonh, where the Tuscarora has nagronh. But the Huron tendi, in use now both at Lorette and Anderdon, shows the result of long intercourse with Europeans begetting an appreciation of their discrimination between the hard and soft consonants. Had the whole series been derived from one source, such orthographic variations would have disappeared. The lists have been furnished to me by the Rev. J. G. Vincent and M. Picard, educated Hurons; L. A. Dorion, an educated Iroquois; Dr. Oronhyatekha, an educated Mohawk; Mr. Horatio Hale; and also from Gallatin’s valuable comparative tables of Indian vocabularies in the Archæologia Americana. In the Synopsis of the Indian Tribes, to which these vocabularies form an appendix, Gallatin classed both the Tuteloes and the Nottoways, along with the Tuscaroras, as southern Iroquois tribes. But recent researches of Mr. Hale have established the true place of the Tuteloes to be with the Dakotan, and not the Huron-Iroquois family. It is otherwise with the Cherohakahs, or Nottoways, whose home was in south-eastern Virginia, where their memory is perpetuated in the name of the river on which they dwelt. At the close of the seventeenth century they still numbered 130 warriors, or about 700 in all; but twenty years later, of the whole tribe only twenty souls survived. At that date two vocabularies of the language were obtained, which furnish satisfactory evidence of the correctness of their classification among southern Iroquois tribes. Their numerals, as shown in the tables, approximate, as might be anticipated, to those of the Tuscaroras, at least in the majority of the primary numbers; whereas those of the Tuteloes are totally dissimilar. As to the Basque numerals introduced alongside of them in the comparative tables, they only suffice to show that the pre-Aryan language still spoken, in varying dialects, on both slopes of the Pyrenees, differed equally widely from the Aryan languages of Europe, and from the Iroquois or any other known American language, except in so far as the latter are agglutinative in structure. Van Eys, in his Basque Grammar, draws attention to the words buluzkorri, and larrugori, “naked”; the first of which literally signifies “red hair,” and the second “red skin.” They are interesting illustrations of the way in which important historical facts lie embedded in ancient languages. But the colour of the hair forbids the inference that the ruddy Basques of primitive centuries were akin to the “Redskins” of the New World.
The phonology of the Iroquois languages is notable in other respects besides those already referred to. According to M. Cuoq, an able philologist, who has laboured for many years as a missionary among the Iroquois of the Province of Quebec, the sounds are so simple that he considers an alphabet of twelve letters sufficient for their indication: a, e, f, h, i, k, n, o, r, s, t, w. The transliterations noticeable in the various Iroquois dialects, follow a well-known phonetic law. Thus the l and r are interchangeable, as ronkwe, “man,” in the Mohawk, becomes in the Oneida lonhwe; raxha, “boy,” becomes laxha; rakeniha, “my father,” becomes lakenih, etc. The same is seen throughout the compound numerals from “eleven” onward. The Cayuga and Tuscarora most nearly approach to the Mohawk in this use of the r. A characteristic change of a different kind is seen in the grammatical value of the initial r in the Mohawk in relation to gender. For example, onkwe is applied to mankind, as distinguished from karyoh, “the brute.” It becomes ronkwe, “man,” yonkwe “woman.” So also raxah, “boy,” changes to kaxha, “girl”; rihyeinah, “my son,” to kheyenah, “my daughter,” etc. The change of gender is further illustrated in such examples as raohih, his apple; raoyen, his arrow; ahkohih, her apple; ahkoyen, her arrow; raonahih (masc.), aonahih (fem.), their apples; raodiyenkwireh (masc.), aodiyenkwireh (fem.), their arrows, etc. But this arrangement of the formative element as a prefix is characteristic of American languages, though not peculiar to them. Thus Seshatsteaghseragwekough, Almighty God (literally, “Thou who hast all power, or strength”), becomes, in the third person, Rashatsteaghseragwekough.
The vowel sounds are very limited. No distinction is apparent in any Huron-Iroquois language between the o and the u. In writing it the e and u sounds are also often interchangeable. Where, for example, e is used in one set of the Tuscarora numerals supplied to me, another substitutes u for it wherever it is followed by an n; e.g. enjih, unjih; ahsenh, ahsunh; endah, undah, etc. So also the word for “man” is written for me in one case onkwe, and in another unkweh. It requires an acute and practised ear to discriminate the niceties of Indian pronunciation, and a no less practised tongue to satisfy the critical native ear. Dr. Oronhyatekha, when pressed to define the value of the t sound in his own name, replied “It is not quite t nor d.” The name is compounded of oronya, “blue,” the word used in the Prayer-Book for “heaven,” and yodakha, “burning.” In very similar terms, Asikinack, an educated Odahwah Indian, when asked by me whether we should say Ottawa, or Odawa—the Utawa of Morris’s “Canadian Boat Song,”—replied that the sound lay between the two,—a nicety discernible only by Indian ears.
The euphonic changes which mark the systematic transitions in the Mohawk language, though by no means peculiar to it, cannot fail to awaken an interest in the thoughtful student, who reflects on the social condition of the people among whom this elaborated vehicle of thought was the constraining power by means of which their chiefs and elders swayed the nations of the Iroquois confederacy with an eloquence more powerful and persuasive than that of many civilised nations. They have been illustrated in the verb; but the same systematic application of euphonic change through all the transitions of their vocabulary is seen in the elaborate word-sentences, so characteristic of the extreme length to which the incorporating mode of structure of the Turanian family of languages is carried in many of those spoken by the American nations. The habitual concentration of complex ideas in a single word has long been recognised, not only as giving a peculiar character to many of the Indian languages, but as one source of their adaptability to the aims of native oratory. From the Massachusetts Bible of Eliot, Professor Whitney quotes a word of eleven syllables; and Gallatin produces from the Cherokee another of seventeen syllables. This frequently embodies a descriptive holophrasm, and so aids the native rendering of novel objects and ideas into a language, the vocabulary of which is necessarily devoid of the requisite terms. But in such cases the agglutinative process is obvious, and the elements of the compounded word must be present to the mind of speaker and hearer. The English word “almighty” is itself an example of the process. It becomes in the Mohawk Prayer-Book seshatsteaghseragwekonh, from seshatsteh, “you are strong,” and ahkwekonh, “all,” or “the whole.” When the missionaries first undertook to render into the Mohawk language the Gospels and Service-Books for Christian worship, it may be doubted if many of their converts had ever seen a sheep. But they had to reproduce in Mohawk this general confession: “We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep.” They did it accordingly in this fashion: Teyagwaderyeadawearyesneoni yoegwathaharagwaghtha tsisahate tsiniyouht yodiyadaghtoeouh teyodinakaroetoeha, which may be literally rendered: “We make a mistake, and get off the track where your road is, the same as strayed animals with small horns.” The extreme literalness of the rendering may probably strike the mind of the English reader in a way that would not occur to the Indian, familiar with such descriptive holophrasms. But it illustrates a difficulty with which Eliot was very familiar when engaged on his Massachusetts Indian Bible. In translating, for example, the song of Deborah and Barak, where the mother of Sisera “cried through the lattice,” the good missionary looked in vain in the Indian wigwam for anything that corresponded to the term. At length he called an Indian and described to him a lattice as wicker-work, and obtained in response a rendering of the text which literally meant: “The mother of Sisera looked through an eel-pot.” It was the only kind of wicker-work of which the Indian had any knowledge.
Evidences of an exceptional development of the æsthetic faculty among the nations of the New World have already been noted; but the Iroquois cannot be included among those specially noticeable for their imitative powers, or in other ways furnishing evidence of any highly developed artistic faculty. They cannot compare in this respect with the Zuñi or others of the Pueblo Indians, among whom the arts of long-settled agricultural communities have been developed for purposes of ornament as well as utility; nor is their inferiority less questionable when we compare them with some of the tribes of the north-west coast and the neighbouring islands. Their languages confirm this; for while, as Mr. Cushing has shown, the Zuñi language possesses many words relating to art-processes, the Iroquois and Algonkin dialects supply such terms for the most part only in descriptive holophrasms, and not in primitive roots.
In Iroquois, the word kar or kare signifies “to paint” or “draw.” The initial k in Iroquois words is usually not radical, and so rarely enters into composite terms. The root of kar, is ar or are, which added to kaiata, or oiata, “living thing, person, body,” makes kaiatare, “image” or “likeness,” i.e. “pictured body,” or as a verb “to paint” or “depict anything.” To this is added the verbal suffix ta or tha, which occasionally becomes stha, and has different meanings, causative and instrumental. The Mohawk supplies such words and terms of art as ahyeyatonh, “to grave”; rahyatonhs, “an engraver”; ahyekonteke, “to paint”; rakonteks, “a painter”; s’hakoyatarha, “an artist”; rahkaratahkwas, “a carver”; rateanakerahtha, “a modeller,” or “one who models figures in clay.” In the Iroquois version of the Gospel of St. John, chap. viii. verse 6 reads thus: Nok tanon ne Iesos wathastsake ehtake nok rasnonsake (more correctly, rasnonkenh) warate wahiaton onwentsiake, lit. “But instead Jesus bent low and with hand used, wrote,” or “engraved, on the earth.” The version of the second commandment in the Mohawk Prayer-Book affords another illustration, in the holophrasm asadatyaghdoenihseroenyea. It is compounded of ahsonniyon, “make”; ahsadadonnyen, “to make for yourself”; kayadonnihsera, “an image” or “doll.” Toghsa asadatyaghdoenihseroenyea, shekonh othenouh taoesakyatayerea nene enekea karouhyakouh, neteas eghtake oughweatsyakonh, etc., lit. “Do not make an image or idol for yourself, even anything like above in the sky, nor below in the earth,” etc.
The word kaiata, or oiata, as already noted, signifies “a living thing, person,” or “body”; kakonsa or okonsa, is the “face” or “visage”; and from those come many derivatives. Bruyas gives gaiata, “a living thing”; gaiatare (or kaiatare) “image,” and as a verb, “to paint.” There is also gaiatonni, “a doll” or “puppet,” i.e. “a made person,” from oiata and konnis, “to make.” From the same root we may probably derive kiaton, “to write,” as in the Iroquois Gospels, wahaiaton, “wrote”; kahiaton, “it is written,” etc. The original meaning was, no doubt, picture-writing, i.e. making images of things. In the old Onondaga dictionary of the Jesuit Fathers is the word kiatonnion, “I keep writing.” The same authority also gives guianatonh (kianatonh), “I paint,” apparently from another root, oiana (kaiana) “track, walk, gait,” etc., which has many derivatives. The remarkable compass and minute nicety of expression which the Iroquois grammar had acquired in the various languages of the Six Nations, approximates to the wonderful expansion effected on the crude Anglo-Saxon verb by the evolution of the auxiliaries out of vague active verbs. This has been effected through the habitual resort to oratory as a source of combined action in the councils of the tribes, which constituted one of the most remarkable characteristics of this representative Indian stock. In this respect the expressive flexibility and rhetorical aptitude of the Iroquois languages stand out in striking contrast to the limited compass of grammatical discrimination in those of Europe’s Scandinavian and Teutonic races by whom the Roman empire was overthrown. They had indeed their “tun-moot,” the council meeting of the village community for justice and government; but the deliberations on the moot-hill, though they embodied the germ of all later parliaments, gave birth to no such development of language. It is when entering on the history of the grand constitutional struggle for a free parliament that Carlyle, in quaint irony, exclaims, or assigns to his apocryphal Dryasdust the exclamation: “I have known nations altogether destitute of printers’ types and learned appliances, with nothing better than old songs, monumental stone heaps and quipo-thrums to keep record by, who had truer memory of their memorable things. . . . The English, one can discern withal, have been perhaps as brave a people as their neighbours; perhaps, for valour of action and true hard labour in this earth, since brave peoples were first made in it, there has been none braver any where or any when:—but also, it must be owned, in stupidity of speech they have no fellow!”[[146]] It suited the purpose of the satirist to ignore for the moment that Shakespeare came of that same speechless race. But in its earlier stage when any comparison with Indian nations is permissible the irony is not extravagant.
But apart from the great compass of the Iroquois verb as illustrative of grammatical development in the languages of unlettered nations, another characteristic feature is the distinction between masculine and feminine forms both in speaking of and to a man or woman. In the study of the minute niceties of the Iroquois verb I have been largely indebted to Dr. Oronhyatekha, and to the Rev. Isaac Bearfoot, both educated Mohawks. When tracing out the comprehensive power of the Mohawk verb, I had in view at the same time the recovery of evidences that the language might supply of an inherent recognition of the artistic faculty. This is much more strongly manifested in other American races in all stages of progress, from the ingenious Haidahs and Tawatins of British Columbia, and the Pueblo Indians of Arizona, to the semi-civilised nations of Mexico and the lettered races of Central and Southern America. Nevertheless the Iroquois recorded in primitive picture-writing the deeds of their departed braves, and have left records in the same crude hieroglyphics, such as the graven rock on Cunningham Island, Lake Erie. Their pipes were carved, and their pottery modelled into representations of familiar objects indicative of a habitual, though simple practice of imitative art that could not fail to beget some counterpart in their languages. Hence the choice of the verb kyadarahste, “to draw.” Kayadareh, or kyadareh, signifies “a body or form in,” e.g. “in a frame” or “group”; kyadarastonh, on the other hand, implies “a body” or “form transferred on to something,” e.g. a board or canvas. The latter is therefore the more expressive and correct term to use for drawing or painting, while it illustrates the process of augmenting the vocabulary to meet the requirements of novel acquisitions in art. But its chief value consists in its affording illustration not only of the inherent capacity of the language to express with minute nicety of detail the manifestations of an æsthetic faculty, as yet very partially developed, but of the compass of its grammar to indicate every distinctive variation of form expressive of time, place, action, object, or subject. The latest results of philological research in this direction are set forth in the Lexique and the Études philologique of Abbé Cuoq, and in an admirable résumé in Mr. Horatio Hale’s introduction to The Iroquois Book of Rites.[[147]] The systematic processes by which the moods and tenses are indicated, either by changes of termination or prefixed particles, or by both conjoined, are carefully indicated by Mr. Hale; but he adds: “A complete grammar of this speech, as full and minute as the best Sanscrit or Greek grammars, would probably equal, and perhaps surpass those grammars in extent. The unconscious forces of memory and of discrimination required to maintain this complicated intellectual machine, and to preserve it constantly exact, and in good working order, must be prodigious.” This tendency to elaborate niceties of discrimination is in striking contrast to that of the modern cultivated languages of Europe; and it is not without reason that it is spoken of as a “complicated intellectual machine.” The contrast, for example, between the Mohawk or other Iroquois verb, in all its complex variations, and the extreme simplicity of the Anglo-Saxon verb, with only its Indefinite and Perfect Tenses,—the former predicated either of the present, or of a future time, and the latter of any past time,—can scarcely fail to impress the thoughtful student who keeps in view the relative civilisation of the Iroquois, and of the English people at the period when Anglo-Saxon in its purely inflectional stage was still the national language. The English verb has since then acquired wonderful power and compass by means of the auxiliary verbs; but its whole tendency is at variance with the elaborations in number and gender of the Iroquois verb. These are only partially illustrated in the above example, and might easily have been carried further. For example, the rendering of the Active, Indicative, Past Progressive, with Feminine Object is really a verb in the passive voice. To realise the full inflectional niceties of such minute grammatical distinctions, the two genders should be given; and also a mixed gender, i.e. the two genders together, as the artists may consist of both sexes. This is indicated in the two forms of the Future Indefinite, by eas’hakodiyadarahste, “they (mas.) shall draw her,” eayaktodiyadarahste, “they (fem.) shall draw her.” But a study of the paradigm of the Mohawk verb will be found to illustrate in a variety of interesting aspects the process of unpremeditated grammatical evolution among an unlettered people, with whom the influence of oratory in the councils of the tribe was one of their most powerful resources as a preliminary to war.
The grand movement of the barbarian races of Northern Europe in the fifth and following centuries is spoken of as the wandering of the nations. The natural barriers of the continent seemed for a time to have given way, and the unknown tribes from beyond the Baltic and from the shores of the North Sea poured into the valley of the Danube, and swept beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees to the furthest shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The physical geography of the New World presents fewer barriers to be surmounted. But if the student of North American ethnology spread before him a map of the continent, and trace out the wanderings of the Huron-Iroquois, he must revert in fancy to that remote era when confederated Iroquois and Algonkins swept in triumphant fury through the wasted valley of the Ohio, and repeated there what Goth and Hun did for Europe, in Rome’s decline and fall. The long-settled and semi-civilised Mound-Builders fled before the furious onset, leaving the great river-valley a desolate waste. The barrier of an old-settled and well-organised community, which, probably for centuries, had kept America’s northern barbarians in check, was removed, and the fierce Huron-Iroquois ranged at will over the eastern regions of the continent, far southward of the North Carolina river-valleys, where the Nottoways and Tuscaroras found a new home. As to the Nottoways, they appear to have passed out of all remembrance as an Iroquois tribe; yet it is suggestive of a long-forgotten chapter of Indian history, that the name is still in use among the northern Algonkins as the designation of the whole Iroquois stock. The Nottawa saga is doubtless a memorial of their presence on the Georgian Bay, and the Notaway (Náhdahwe) river which falls into Hudson Bay at James Bay, is so named in memory of Huron-Iroquois wanderers into that Algonkin region.
Some portion of the ancient Huron stock tarried on the banks of the St. Lawrence, in what is known to us now as the traditional cradleland of those Canadian aborigines. Others found their way down the Hudson, or selected new homes for themselves on the rivers and lakes that lay to the west, till they reached the shores of Lake Erie; and all that is now the populous region of Western New York was in occupation of the Iroquois race. Feuds broke out between them and the parent stock in the valley of the St. Lawrence. They meted out to those of their own race the same vengeance as to strangers; and the survivors, abandoning their homes, fled westward in search of settlements beyond their reach. The Georgian Bay lay remote from the territory of the Iroquois, but the nations of the Wyandot stock spread beyond it, until the Niagara peninsula and the fertile regions between Lake Huron and Lake Erie were occupied by them, and the Niagara river alone kept apart what were now hostile tribes. But wherever the test of linguistic evidence can be obtained their affinities are placed beyond dispute. On the other hand, the multiplication of dialects is no less apparent, and in many ways helps to throw light on the history of the race.
The old Huron mother tongue still partially preserves the labials which have disappeared from all the Iroquois languages. The Mohawk approaches nearest to this, and appears to be the main stem from whence other languages of the Six Nations have branched off. But the diversities in speech of the various members of the confederacy leave no room to doubt the prolonged isolation of the several tribes, or “nations,” before they were induced to recognise the claims of consanguinity, and to band together for their common interest. Some of the noteworthy diversities of tongue may be pointed out, such as the r sound which predominates in the Mohawk, while the l takes its place in the Oneida. In the Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, they are no longer heard. The last of these reduces the primary forms to the narrowest range; but beyond, to the westward, the old Eries dwelt, speaking, it may be presumed, a modified Seneca dialect, but of which unfortunately no record survives. As to the Tuscaroras and the Nottoways, if we knew nothing of their history, their languages would suffice to tell that they had been longest and most widely separated from the parent stock.
It is not without interest to note in conclusion that the main body of the representatives of the nations of the ancient Iroquois league sprung from the Huron-Iroquois stock of Eastern Canada,—after sojourning for centuries beyond the St. Lawrence, until the traditions of the home of the race had faded out of memory, or given place to mythic legends of autochthon origin,—has returned to Canadian soil. At Caughnawaga, St. Regis, Oka, and on the river St. Charles, in the Province of Quebec; at Anderdon, the Bay of Quinté, and above all, on the Grand river, in Ontario; the Huron-Iroquois are now settled to the number of upwards of 8000, without reckoning other tribes. If, indeed, the surviving representatives of the aborigines in the old provinces of the Canadian Dominion are taken as a whole, they number upwards of 34,000, apart from the many thousands in Manitoba, British Columbia, and the North-west Territories. But the nomad Indians must be classed wholly apart from the settlers on the Grand river reserves. The latter are a highly intelligent, civilised people, more and more adapting themselves to the habits of the strangers who have supplanted them; and they are destined as certainly to merge into the predominant race, as the waters of their ancient lakes mingle and are lost in the ocean. Yet the process is no longer one of extinction but of absorption; and will assuredly leave traces of the American autochthones, similar to those which still in Europe perpetuate some ethnical memorial of Allophylian races.
| [111] | Types of Mankind, p. 291. |
| [112] | The Jesuits in North America, p. 43. |
| [113] | The Indian Races of North and South America, p. 286. |
| [114] | Magazine of American History, vol. x. p. 479. |
| [115] | Archæologia Americana, vol. ii. p. 173. |
| [116] | Indian Migrations, p. 17. |
| [117] | Whitney’s Study of Language, p. 348. |
| [118] | The Tutelo Tribe and Language, p. 9. |
| [119] | Relation, 1641, p. 72. |
| [120] | Peter Jones and the Ojibway Indians, p. 31. |
| [121] | The Life and Growth of Languages, p. 259. |
| [122] | Hale’s Indian Migrations as evidenced by Language, p. 3. |
| [123] | Anthropology, by Dr. Paul Topinard: Eng. Trans., p. 480. |
| [124] | “The Huron Race and Head-form:” N. S. Canadian Journal, vol. xiii. p. 113. |
| [125] | Crania Americana, p. 195. |
| [126] | The Jesuits in North America, p. 47. |
| [127] | The Iroquois Book of Rites, p. 78. |
| [128] | Ibid., pp. 21, 22. |
| [129] | League of the Iroquois, p. 4. |
| [130] | Notes on the Iroquois, p. 51. |
| [131] | Lectures on the Science of Language, 5th ed. p. 58. |
| [132] | Notes on the Iroquois, p. 52. |
| [133] | Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandotts, p. 4. |
| [134] | Pioneers of France in the New World, p. 367. |
| [135] | League of the Iroquois, p. 76. |
| [136] | The Jesuits in North America, p. 441 note. |
| [137] | History of the Indian Tribes, vol. ii. p. 78. |
| [138] | “Huron Race and Head-form,” Canadian Journal, N. S., vol. xiii. p. 113. |
| [139] | “Some American Illustrations of the Evolution of new Varieties of Man,” Journal of Anthropology, May 1879. |
| [140] | The Huron vocabulary prepared by the Jesuit Father, Chaumonot, is, as I have recently learned, still in existence, and will, I hope, be speedily published under trustworthy editorial supervision. |
| [141] | The League of the Iroquois, p. 2. |
| [142] | Archæologia Americana, vol. ii. p. 79. |
| [143] | Indian Migrations, p. 22. |
| [144] | Life and Growth of Language, p. 261. |
| [145] | Lectures on the Science of Language, 2nd series, p. 162. |
| [146] | Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, Introduction. |
| [147] | See p. 110. |
VII
HYBRIDITY AND HEREDITY
Four centuries have now completed their course since the discovery of America revealed to Europe an indigenous people, distinct in many respects from all the races of the Old World. There, as in the older historic areas, man is indeed seen in various stages: from the rudest condition of savage life, without any knowledge of metallurgy, and subsisting solely by the chase, to the comparatively civilised nations of Mexico, Central America, and Peru, familiar with some of the most important arts, skilled in agriculture, and with a system of writing embodying the essential germs of intellectual progress.
The western hemisphere, which was the arena of such ethnical development, had lain, for unnumbered centuries, apart from Asia and Europe; and so its various nationalities and races were left to work out their own destinies, and to develop in their own way whatever inherent capacities for progress pertained to them. But this done, it was abruptly brought into intimate relations with Europe by the maritime discoveries which marked the closing years of the fifteenth century.
From that date a constant transfer of races from the Old to the New World has been taking place, alike by voluntary and enforced migration; with results involving a series of undesigned yet exhaustive ethnological experiments carried out on the grandest scale. There alike has been tested to what extent the European and the African are affected by migration to new regions, and by admixture with diverse races. There can now be witnessed the results of a transference, for upwards of three centuries, of indigenous populations of the Old World to a continent where they have been subjected to many novel geographical, climatic, and social influences. There, too, has taken place, on a scale without any parallel elsewhere, an intimate and prolonged intermixture of some of the most highly cultured races of Europe with purely savage tribes, under circumstances which have tended to place them, for the time being, on an equality as hunters, trappers, or explorers of their vast forest and prairie wilds.
The whole question of heredity, its phenomena and results, is now in process of review under the novel phases that affect anthropology; and in this view the illustrations which the New World supplies in reference to hybridity and absorption have a distinctive value. The anthropologist recognises various elements marking diversity of race in stature, colour, proportion of limbs, conformation of skull, colour and other characteristics of eye and hair. He also notes no less distinctively the diverse intellectual and moral aptitudes. Noticeable as are the diversities of national type in Europe, the range of variation is trifling when compared with the conditions under which the White, Red, and Black races have met and intermingled in the West Indies and in North and South America. The cultured and civilised races of Europe have there united their blood with the African negro and the native Indian savage; and both admixtures have been carried out on so great a scale as to furnish indisputable data for determining the question how far the half-breed is a mean between the two parents; or if there is any inevitable preponderance of one of them, with a tendency to revert to one or the other type. The intermarriage of fair and dark races of the Old World has gone on throughout the whole historic period, with apparently resultant intermediate types. The Iberians and “black Celts” of Western Europe, and the dark brunettes of the Mediterranean shores, stand out in marked contrast to the blondes of the Baltic shores. Whatever may be said of other diversities of race, Professor Huxley is led to the opinion that the Melanochroi, or dark whites, are not a distinct group, but the metis resultant from just such a mixture of his “Australioids” and his “Xanthocroi,” as has been going on for centuries on the American continent between the blondes of Europe and the native olive-skinned American, and between both of them and the dark African race.
Yet, on the other hand, many anthropologists insist on the survival of distinct types, even among approximate races, as shown in the remarkable persistency of the Jewish type, notwithstanding the modifications that have resulted from intermarriage with fair and dark races of many lands. Dr. F. von Luschan, in describing the Tachtadschy,[[148]] calls attention to the fact that the Greeks of Lycia represent a mixture of two distinct types. From this he draws the following inference: “At first glance it appears remarkable and hardly probable that two disparate types should remain distinct, although intermarriage has continued without interruption through thousands of years. But we must acknowledge that it would be just as remarkable if continued intercrossing should result in the production of a middle type (Mischform). It is true that at the present time the greater number of anthropologists appear to be of the opinion that middle forms originate wherever two distinct types live in close contact for a long time. If this is true at all, it is true only in a very limited sense, and still needs to be proven. A priori, we rather ought to expect that one or the other of these types would soon succumb in the struggle for existence. It would become extinct, and give way to the other type; or both types might continue to co-exist, although intercrossing might go on for centuries. They would undergo no other changes than those which each singly, uninfluenced by the other, would have undergone by the agency of physical causes.”
The evidence we possess of the physical characteristics of the succession of races in Europe from palæolithic times is already considerable; and in reference to neolithic and later periods is ample. Within the recent historic period of the decline and fall of Rome, and the influx of Northern and Asiatic barbarians, the evidence of admixture of race is abundant; and the physical, intellectual, and moral changes resulting therefrom have stamped their ineffaceable impress on history. But the conditions under which the meeting of the Aryans with Allophylians, Neolithians, or other prehistoric races took place in older centuries, can only be surmised; and the many analogies resulting from the intrusion of the European races on the aborigines of the western hemisphere are calculated to render useful aid in determining some definite results.
History has familiarised us with the idea of sovereign and subject races. The monuments of Egypt perpetuate the fact from its remote dawn, Punic, Roman, Gothic, Frank, Saracenic, and Scandinavian races, have in turn subdued others, and made them subservient to their will. Evidence of a different kind, but little less definite, points to the intrusion into Europe in prehistoric times of races superior alike in physical type, and in the arts upon which progress depends, to the Autochthones, or primitive occupants of the soil. Further indications have been assumed to point to the contemporaneous presence, in primeval Britain, as elsewhere, of races of diverse type, and apparently in the relation of lord and serf: a natural if not indeed inevitable consequence of the intrusion of a superior race of conquerors.
But in the New World the inaptitude of the native race for useful serfdom largely contributed to the introduction there of other and very diverse races from Africa and Asia; so that now within a well-defined North American area, indigenous populations of the three continents of the Old World are displacing its native races. Still more, all three meet there under circumstances which inevitably lead to their intermixture with one another, and with the native races.
Various terms, such as Iberian, Silurian, Canstadt, Cimbric, Finnish, and Turanian, have been applied to primitive types as expressive of the hypothesis of their origin. But on turning to the American continent we see vast regions occupied exclusively until a comparatively recent period by tribes of savage hunters, upon whom some of the most civilised races of Europe have intruded, with results in many respects so strikingly accordant with the supposed evolution of the Melanochroi of the Old World, that we seem to look upon a series of ethnological experiments prolonged through centuries, with synthetic results to a large extent confirmatory of previous inductions.
The intermingling of very diverse races at present taking place on the American continent includes some of widely diverse types. There is seen the Portuguese in Brazil; the Spaniard in Peru, Mexico, Central America, and in Cuba; the African in the West Indies and the Southern States; the Chinese on the Pacific; the Frenchman on the St. Lawrence; the German, the Italian, the Norwegian, the Icelander, the Celt, and the Anglo-Saxon: all subjected to novel influences, necessarily testing the results of a change of climate, of diet, and of social habits, on the ethnical character of each. There too, alike in the Red and the Black races, we can study the results of hybridity carried out on a scale adequate to determine many important points calculated to throw light on the origin and perpetuation of diverse races of mankind.
The growth of a race of hybrid African blood has been one of the results of the substitution at an early date of imported negro slaves to supply the place of the rapidly disappearing Indians who perished under the exactions of their taskmasters. According to careful data set forth in the United States census for 1850, the whole number of native Africans imported cannot have exceeded 400,000. At present the coloured race—hybrids chiefly—of African blood numbers nearly 7,000,000. In 1715 there were 58,000 negroes in British America; in 1775, when the revolution broke out, there were 501,102. After the epoch of independence the increase became more rapid. In 1790 the numbers were 757,208; in 1800, 893,041; in 1810, 1,191,364. At the date of emancipation in 1865 there were, in round numbers, in slavery, 4,000,000; and at the census in 1880 the negro population in the United States had risen to 6,580,793;[[149]] and in the returns thus far published relative to the later census of 1890, in the Southern States alone they are reported to number 6,996,116; so that with the added numbers of the Northern States and Canada they can fall little short of 8,000,000. Of this numerous intrusive race, the larger number are hybrids; and, as was inevitable, they include some small proportion of mixed negro and Indian blood.[[150]] But it is the Metis, or White and Red half-breed, that constitutes the subject of special interest here.
Various causes have tended to beget more friendly relations between the older colonists of New France, and at a later date between those of British America and the native Indian race, than have existed either in Spanish America or the United States.
The great North-West, with its warlike Chippeways, Crees, Sioux, and Blackfeet; and beyond the Rocky Mountains its Tinné, Babeens, Clalams, Newatees, Chinooks, Cowlitz, and numerous other native tribes; had till recently been under the control of the all-powerful fur-trading company of Hudson Bay. The interests of the fur-traders stimulated them to fair and honourable dealing with the native tribes; and while they had no motive to encourage the Indians to abandon their nomadic life for the civilised habits of a settled people, or even to interpose in the wars which varied the monotony of the Indians’ wild hunter-life, they had so thoroughly won the confidence of the natives, that tribes at open enmity with each other were ready to repose equal confidence in the Hudson Bay factors.
The late Paul Kane, author of Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, informed me that when travelling beyond the Rocky Mountains he found no difficulty in transmitting his correspondence home, even when among the rudest Flathead savages. His packet, entrusted to one of the tribe, was accompanied with a small gift of tobacco, and the request to have it forwarded to Fort Garry, or other Hudson Bay fort. The messenger—Cowlitz, Chinook, Nasquallie, or other Indian,—carried it to the frontier of his own hunting-grounds, and then sold it for so much tobacco to some Indian of another tribe; by him it was passed on, by like process of barter, till it crossed the Rocky Mountains into the territory of the Blackfeet, the Crees, and so onward to its destination, in full confidence that the officers of the Hudson Bay Fort would sustain the credit of the White Medicine-man (for so the painter was regarded), and redeem the packet at its full value in tobacco or other equivalent.
The personal interests of the little bands of European fur-traders thus settled in the heart of a wilderness, and surrounded by savage hunters, no less strongly prompted them to exclude the maddening fire-water from the vast regions under their control. Guns and ammunition, kettles, axes, knives, beads, and other trinkets, with the no less prized tobacco, were abundantly provided for barter. Even nails and the iron hoops of their barrels were traded with the Indians, and displaced the primitive tomahawk and arrow head of flint or stone. Thus, curiously, the Stone period of a people still in the most primitive stage of barbarism has been superseded by the use of metals obtained solely by barter, and without any advance either in the knowledge of metallurgy, or in the mastery of the arts which lie at the foundation of all civilisation. Long before the advent of Europeans, the Chippeways along the shores of Lake Superior had been familiar with the native copper which abounds there in the condition of pure metal. But they knew it only as a kind of malleable stone; nor have they even now learned the application of fire in their simple metallurgic processes. The root of their names for iron and copper is the same abstract term, wahbik, used only in compound words, and apparently in the sense of rock or stone. Pewahbik is iron; ozahwahbik, copper, literally the yellow stone. It formed no part of the Hudson Bay traders’ aim to advance him beyond the stage of a savage hunter. It was incompatible with the interests of the fur-trader to teach him any higher use of the rich prairie land than that of a wilderness inhabited by fur-bearing animals, or a grazing ground for the herds of buffalo which furnished their annual supply of pemmican; or to familiarise him with more of the borrowed arts of civilisation than helped to facilitate the accumulation of peltries in the factory stores. Hence the intrusive Europeans and the native tribes met on common ground, engaged in the same pursuits, all tending to foster the habits of hunter-life; and so presenting a close analogy to the condition of Europe when, in its Neolithic age, its rude hunter tribes were invaded by the Aryans. Thus engaged to a large extent in the same pursuits, the Whites and Indians of the Canadian North-West have dwelt together for successive generations on terms of comparative equality, and with results of curious interest, hereafter referred to, in relation to the intermingling of the races.
In the long-settled provinces of Canada it has been otherwise. There the aborigines had to be gathered together on suitable reserves, and induced to accommodate themselves in some degree to the habits of an industrious agricultural population; or to be driven out, to wander off into the great hunting-grounds of the uncleared West. The exterminating native wars, which preceded the settlement of Upper Canada, greatly facilitated this; and the tribes with which the English colonists of Ontario have had to deal have been for the most part immigrants, not greatly less recent than themselves. As to the Six Nation Indians settled on the Grand River and at the Bay of Quinté (the most numerous and the farthest advanced in civilisation of all the Indians in the British provinces), they are a body of loyalist refugees who followed the fortunes of their English allies on the declaration of independence by the revolted Colonies; and there is now in use, at the little Indian Church at Tuscarora, the silver Communion Plate presented to their ancestors while still in the valley of the Mohawk, in the State of New York, the gift of Her Majesty Queen Anne, “to her Indian Chappel of the Mohawks.”[[151]]
But the civilisation which has thus resulted from prolonged and intimate relations with the Whites, has been accompanied by an inevitable admixture of blood, of which the results are abundantly manifest in the physical characteristics of the Indian settlers, both on the Grand river and at the Bay of Quinté. The system of adopting members of other tribes, including even those of their vanquished foes, to recruit their own numbers, was practised by many of the North American tribes, and was familiar to the Iroquois, or Indians of the Five Nations, as they were styled before the admission of the Tuscaroras to their confederacy. In 1649, for example, the survivors of two of the Huron towns which they had ravaged, besought the favour of the victors, and were adopted into the Seneca nation. Nor did extreme differences of race interfere with affiliation, as in the case of children kidnapped from the White colonists in their vicinity. One interesting example of the latter suffices to illustrate the extent to which such a process tended to affect the ethnical purity of the race.
In the year 1779, while the Mohawks still dwelt in their native valley in the State of New York, Ste-nah, a white girl, then about twelve years of age, was captured in one of their marauding expeditions, and adopted into the tribe. In 1868, while still living, she was described to me by an educated Mohawk India, as a full-blood Sko-ha-ra, or Dutchwoman. She grew up among her captors, accompanied the tribe on their removal from the Mohawk valley to the shores of the Bay of Quinté, and married one of the Mohawk braves. She had reached mature years, and was the mother of Indian children, when an aged stranger visited the reserve in search of his long-lost daughter. He had heard of a captive white woman who survived among the emigrant Mohawks there, and was able, by certain marks, and the scar of a wound received in childhood, to identify his long-lost daughter. But the discovery came too late. As my Mohawk informant told me, she had got an Indian heart. She had, indeed, lost her native tongue; had acquired the habits and sympathies of her adopted people; and coldly repelled the advances of her aged father, who in vain recalled his long-lost daughter Christina in the Mohawk white-blood, Ste-nah. If the date of her capture and her estimated age can be relied on, she must have been in her hundred and fifth year at the time of her death, in December 1871. I have received through one of her grandsons—himself a Mohawk chief,—a genealogical table of her descendants, from which it appears that there are at the present time fifty-seven of them living and twenty-three dead. It is thus apparent, that by the adoption of a single White captive into the tribe, there are, in the fourth generation, fifty-seven survivors out of eighty members of the tribe, all of them of hybrid character.
The influence of a single case of admixture of White blood, thus followed out to its results in the fourth generation, suffices to show how largely those tribes must be affected who dwell for any length of time in close vicinity to White settlers, and in intimate friendly relations with them. The earlier French and English colonists, like the Hudson Bay traders of later times, were mostly young adventurers, without wives, and readily entering into alliance with the native women. The children of such unions were admitted to a perfect equality with the Whites, when trained up in their settlements; and in the older period of French and English rivalry the Indians were dealt with on very different terms from those with which they are now regarded, though even yet some memory of older relations survives.
During the wars between the French and English colonists to the north and south of the St. Lawrence, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the alliance of neighbouring Indian tribes was courted; and the traditions of the fidelity of the Hurons to the French, and the loyalty of the Iroquois to the English, are cherished as incentives to the fulfilment of obligations entered into on behalf of the little remnant of the Huron nation remaining on the river St. Charles, below Quebec; and to a liberal and generous policy towards the Six Nation Indians settled on the Grand river and elsewhere in Western Canada.
But also in the primitive simplicity of border life, the half-civilised Indian and the rude settler meet on common ground; and in some cases the friendly relations established between them have survived the more settled condition of agricultural progress in the clearings. In this respect the older colonists of Quebec fraternised far more readily with the native population than has been the case with English settlers. The relations in which the early French colonists stood to the Indians of Lower Canada bore more resemblance to those of the fur-traders of the North-West in later times, and were of a kindlier nature than those of the intrusive European emigrants of the present century. Prior to the accession of Louis XIV. to the throne, the French possessions in the New World had been regarded as little more than a hunting-ground to be turned to the same account as the Hudson Bay Company’s territory; and the peopling of Canada had given little promise of permanent colonisation. Priests and nuns alone varied the usual class of trading adventurers who resort to a young colony. But soon after the King reached his majority, a systematic shipment of emigrants to Canada was organised under the direction of Colbert; sundry companies of soldiers were disbanded in the colony; and then, at last, the necessity of finding wives for the settlers was recognised. Thereupon a system of female emigration, with bounties on marriage, was established. Colbert, writing to the Canadian Intendant, tells him that the prosperity of the people, and all that is most dear to them as colonists, depend upon their securing the marriage of youths not later than their eighteenth or nineteenth year to girls at fourteen or fifteen; and the next step was to impose a fine on the father of a family who neglected to marry his children when they reached the respective ages of twenty and sixteen.
Up to this period the native women had chiefly supplied wives for the colonists; nor was this element now ignored or slighted. In the Mémoire sur l’Etat Présent du Canada, 1667, it is stated: “At this time it was believed that the Indians, mingled with the French, might become a valuable part of the population. The reproductive qualities of Indian women therefore became an object of attention to Talon, the Royal Intendant; and he reports that they impair their fertility by nursing their children longer than is needful; but, he adds, ‘this obstacle to the speedy building up of the colony can be overcome by regulations of police.’ ” Thus it is apparent that the strongest encouragement was given to such alliances.
The religious element, moreover, among a purely Roman Catholic population, helped to foster a sense of equality in the case of the Christianised Indian; while the gentler and less progressive habits of the French habitants have tended to prevent direct collision with the Indians settled in their midst. Hence in the province of Quebec, half-breeds, and men and women of partial Indian blood, are frequently to be met with in all ranks of life; and slighter traces, discernible in the hair, the eye, the cheek-bone, and peculiar mouth, as well as certain traits of Indian character, suggest to the close observer remote indications of the same admixture of blood.
But while favouring influences in national character, political institutions, and religion, all united to encourage a more friendly intercourse between the native and European population of Lower Canada, the circumstances attendant on the settlement of new clearings have everywhere led in some degree to similar results; and experience abundantly proves the impossibility of preserving distinct two races living in close proximity to each other.
Throughout the old provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, and the Maritime Provinces, where the aborigines are mostly congregated on reserves, under the charge of Government officers of the Indian Department, they appear, with few exceptions, to have passed the critical stage of transition from a nomadic state to that of assimilation to the habits of settled industry of the Whites.
The native tribes of the old provinces of the Dominion, though bearing a variety of names, may all be classed under the two essentially distinct groups of Algonkins and Iroquois. Under the former head properly rank the Micmacs, and other tribes of Prince Edward’s Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick; and the Chippeways, including Ottawas, Mississagas, Pottawattomies, etc., of Ontario. Under the other head have to be placed not only the Six Nations—Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras,—but also the Wyandots, or Hurons, both of Upper and Lower Canada; though among the one were found the faithful allies of the English, while the other adhered persistently to the French; and to the deadly enmity between them was due the expulsion of the Hurons from their ancient territory on the Georgian Bay, and the extermination of all but an insignificant remnant, including the refugees on the St. Charles river, below Quebec.
The Canadian census of 1871 includes the aborigines in the enumeration of the population of the Dominion, and states the grand total of the Indians of the Provinces of Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, at 23,035.
That the Indian population, gathered on their own reserved lands under the care of Government superintendents, is not diminishing in numbers, appears to be universally admitted. But as, at the same time, the pure race is being largely replaced by younger generations of mixed blood, the results cannot be looked upon as encouraging the hope of perpetuating the native Indian race under such exceptional conditions; nor can it be overlooked that the increase is partly begot by the addition of a foreign element. At best the results point rather to such a process of absorption as appears to be the inevitable result wherever a race, alike inferior in numbers and in progressive energy, escapes extirpation at the hands of the intruders.
In the boyhood of the older generation of Toronto, hundreds of Indians, including those of the old Mississaga tribe, were to be seen about the streets. Now, at rare intervals, two or three squaws, in round hats, blue blankets, and Indian leggings, attract attention less by their features than their dress; for in complexion they are nearly as white as those of pure European descent. The same is the case on all the oldest Indian reserves. The Hurons of Lorette, whose forefathers were brought to Lower Canada after the massacre of their nation by the Iroquois in 1649, are reported to have considerably increased in numbers in the interval between 1844 and the last census. But while the Commissioners refer to them as a band of Indians “the most advanced in civilisation in the whole of Canada,” they add that “they have, by the intermixture of White blood, so far lost the original purity of race as scarcely to be considered as Indians.” In their case this admixture with the European race has been protracted through a period of upwards of two centuries, till they have lost their Indian language, and substituted for it a French patois. Were it not for their hereditary right to a share in certain Indian funds, which furnishes an inducement to perpetuate their descent from the Huron nation, they would long since have merged in the common stock. Yet the results would not thereby have been eradicated, but only lost sight of. Their baptismal registers and genealogical traditions supply the record of a practical, though undesigned, experiment as to the influence of hybridity on the perpetuation of the race, and show the mixed descendants of Huron and French blood still, after a lapse of upwards of two centuries, betraying no traces of a tendency towards infertility or extinction.
In the Maritime Provinces the Micmacs are the representatives of the aboriginal owners of the soil. Small encampments of them may be encountered in summer on the Lower St. Lawrence, busily engaged in the manufacture of staves, barrel-hoops, axe-handles, and baskets of various kinds, which they dispose of, with much shrewdness, to the traders of Quebec, and the smaller towns on the Gulf. So far as I have seen, the pure-blood Micmac has more of the dark-red, in contrast to the prevalent olive hue, than other Indians. But the Micmacs of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick reveal the same evidence of inevitable amalgamation with the predominant race as elsewhere. The Rev. S. T. Rand—a devoted missionary labouring among the Indians of Nova Scotia,—on being asked to obtain a photograph of a pure-blood representative of the tribe, had some difficulty in finding a single example, and stated that not one is to be found among the younger generation.
In the old provinces the Indians are in the minority; but the same process is apparent where little bands of pioneers leave the settled provinces and states to begin new clearings, or to engage in the adventurous life of hunters and trappers in the far West. The hunter finds a bride among the native women; and when at length the wild tribe recedes before the growing clearing and the diminished supplies of game, it not only leaves behind a half-breed population as the nucleus of the civilised community, but it also carries away with it a like element, increasingly affecting the ethnical character of the whole tribe.
The same circumstances have continued, in every frontier settlement, to involve the inevitable production of a race of half-breeds. Even the cruellest exterminations of hostile tribes have rarely been carried out so effectually as to preclude this. In New England, for example, after the desolating war of 1637, which resulted in the extinction of the Pequot tribe, Winthrop thus summarily records the policy of the victors: “We sent the male children to Bermuda by Mr. William Pierce, and the women and maid children are disposed about in the towns.” Such a female population could not grow up in a young colony, with the wonted preponderance of males, and leave no traces in subsequent generations.
Seeing, then, that the meeting of two types of humanity so essentially distinct as the European and the native Indian of America, has, for upwards of three centuries, led to the production of a hybrid race, it becomes an interesting question, what has been the ultimate result? Has the mixed breed proved infertile, and so disappeared; has it perpetuated a new and permanent type of intermediate characteristics; or has it been absorbed into the predominant European race without leaving traces of this foreign element? These questions are not without their significance even in reference to the policy in dealing with the Indian settlements in old centres of population; for the traces of this intermingling of the races of the Old and New World are neither limited to frontier settlements nor to Indian reserves.
Among Canadians of mixed blood there are men at the Bar and in the Legislature, in the Church, in the medical profession, holding rank in the army, in aldermanic and other civic offices, and engaged in active trade and commerce. A curious case was recently brought before the law courts in Ontario. A son of the chief of the Wyandot Indians settled in Western Canada, left the reserves of his tribe, engaged in business, and acquired a large amount of real estate and personal property. He won for himself, moreover, such general respect that he was elected Reeve of Anderdon by a considerable majority over a White candidate. Thereupon his rival applied to have him unseated, on the plea that a person of Indian blood was not a citizen in the eye of the law. Fortunately the judge took a common-sense view of the case, and decided that as he held a sufficient property-qualification within the county, the election was valid.
That an Indian ceases to be such in the eye of the law, and in all practical relations to society, when he becomes an educated industrious member of the general community, and competes not only for its privileges but for its highest honours, is inevitable. But it is not with the Indian as with the Negro mixed race. The privileges and the disabilities of the Indian ward may both be cast off; but a certain degree of romance attaches to Indian blood, when accompanied with the culture and civilisation of the European. The descendants of Brant and other distinguished native chiefs are still proud to claim their lineage, where the physical traces of such an ancestry would escape the eye of a common observer. Traces of Indian descent may be recognised among ladies of attractive refinement and intelligence, and with certain mental as well as physical traits which add to the charm of their society. Similar indications of the blood of the aborigines are familiar to Canadians in the gay assemblies of a Governor-General’s receptions, in the halls of Legislature, in the diocesan synods and other ecclesiastical assemblies, and amongst the undergraduates of Canadian universities.
But the condition of men and women of mixed blood, admitted to all the privileges of citizenship, and mingling in perfect equality with all other members of the community, is in striking contrast to that of the occupants of the Indian reserves, where they are settled, for the most part in isolated bands, in the midst of a progressive White population. Such a condition is manifestly an unfavourable one, and one, moreover, which cannot be regarded as other than transitional. They are confessedly dealt with as wards, in a state of pupilage.
A growing sense of the necessity for some modification of this system has been felt for a considerable time; and in 1867 “An Act to encourage the gradual Civilisation of the Indian Tribes,” received the royal assent. This Act avowedly aims at the “gradual removal of all legal distinctions between them and Her Majesty’s other Canadian subjects; and to facilitate the acquisition of property, and of the rights accompanying it, by such individual members of the said tribes as shall be found to desire such encouragement, and to have deserved it.”
That the ultimate result of this will involve the disappearance of the Indian as a distinct race is inevitable. He will be absorbed into the dominant race; not to be displaced or driven out of the community; but to be perpetuated, as the precursors of the blonde Aryans of Europe still survive in the “dark Whites” that now, in undisputed equality, enjoy all the rights of citizenship of a common race. They will indeed constitute but a small remnant of the nations of Euramerican blood. That whole tribes and peoples of the American aborigines have been exterminated in the process of colonisation of the New World is no more to be questioned, than that a similar result followed from the Roman conquest and colonisation of Britain. Nevertheless, long and careful study of the subject has satisfied me that a larger amount of absorption of the Indian into the Anglo-American race has occurred than is generally recognised.
Fully to appreciate this, it is necessary to retrace the course of events by which America has been transferred to the descendants of European colonists. At every fresh stage of colonisation, or of pioneering into the wild West, the work has necessarily been accomplished by hardy young adventurers, or the hunters or trappers of the clearing. It is rare indeed for such to be accompanied by wives or daughters. Where they find a home they take to themselves wives from among the native women; and their offspring share in whatever advantages the father transplants with him to this home in the wilderness. To such mingling of blood, in its least favourable aspects, the prejudices of the Indian present little obstacle. Henry, in his narrative of travel among the Cristineaux on Lake Winipagoos upwards of a century ago, after describing the dress and allurements of the women, adds: “One of the chiefs assured me that the children borne by their women to Europeans were bolder warriors and better hunters than themselves.” This idea recurs in various forms. The half-breed lumberers and trappers are valued throughout Canada for their hardihood and patient endurance; the half-breed hunters and trappers are equally esteemed in the Hudson Bay territory; and beyond their remotest forts Dr. Kane reported, as his experience within the Arctic circle, that “the half-breeds of the coast rival the Esquimaux in their powers of endurance.”
Mr. Charles Horetskey, in his Canada on the Pacific, after remarking on the well-known fact that Japanese junks have been known to drift on to the Pacific coast of America, and so contribute new elements of Mongolian character to the native population, thus proceeds to notice another element of hybridity. “There is,” he says, “another mixture in the blood on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and a very marked one—the Spanish, owing to the Spaniards having long had a settlement at Nootka. Strangely enough, the Spanish cast of countenance does not show in the women, who have the same flat features as their sisters to the eastward. Nor is it so noticeable among the young men, many of whom, however, have beards—a most unusual appendage among American Indians, and of course traceable to the cause referred to. The features are more observable among the older men, many of whom, with their long, narrow, pointed faces and beards, would, if washed, present very fair models for Don Quixote.” Within the region of Alaska, Russian traders have contributed another element to the mingling of races; and Mr. Wm. H. Dall, in his Alaska and its Resources, states specifically the number of the Creoles or half-breeds of that region as 1421. But the present condition of society there favours their increase. In 1842, they were, for the first time, qualified to enter the Church as priests; and in 1865, the American Expedition found Ivan Pavloff, the son of a Russian father and a native woman of Kenai, filling the office of Bidarshik, or commander of the post at Nulato. He was legally married to a full-blooded Indian woman, by whom he had a large family.
Another intrusive element, that of the Asiatic Mongol, has awakened alarm for the possible future of the white race of settlers, both in America and in Australia. In 1875 the number of Chinese in California amounted to 130,000; 19,000 arrived in a single year. They speedily made their way to the New England States, and to Eastern Canada; till it has been deemed politic to forbid further immigration. It is the intrusion of a type approximating to the American Mongol, and so has a special interest in its bearing on the ethnology of the continent; for here we see the approximate types of Asia and America brought into contact, it may be as descendants of a common stock, separated through unnumbered centuries by untraversed oceans.
The Indians of Vancouver Island and British Columbia were estimated in 1860 to number 75,000. The observations of Paul Kane in 1846 showed that a considerable half-breed population already existed then in the vicinity of every Hudson Bay fort. But at the later date the reported richness of the gold-diggings was attracting hundreds of settlers; and as usual, in such cases, nearly all males. The admixture of blood with the native population consequent on such a social condition is inevitable; and though such a population is least likely to leave behind it any permanent traces among settled civilised colonists, yet the condition of things which it presents illustrates the social life of every frontier settlement of the New World. Everywhere the colonisation of the outlying territory begins with a migration of males, and by and by the cry comes from Australia, Canada, and elsewhere, for stimulated female emigration. It is a state of things old as the dispersion of the human race, and typified in such ancient legends as the Roman Rape of the Sabines. The abstract of the United States census of 1860 showed that the old settled states of New England are affected even more than European countries by this inevitable source of the disparity of the sexes. In Massachusetts, at that date, the females outnumbered the males by upwards of 37,000; while in Indiana, on the contrary, they fell short of the males by 48,000.
In the latter case, on a frontier state, where the services of the Indian women must necessarily be courted in any attempt at domestic life, intermixture between the native and intruding races is inevitable, and the feeling with which it is regarded finds expression constantly through the genuine New World lyrics of Joaquin Miller, with his “brown bride won from an Indian town”—
Where some were blonde and some were brown,
And all as brave as Sioux.
Thus the same process still repeats itself along the widening frontier of the far West, which has been in operation on the American continent from the days of Columbus and Cabot. Hardy bands of pioneer adventurers, or the solitary hunter and trapper, wander forth to brave the dangers of the prairie or savage-haunted forest, and to such, an Indian bride proves the fittest mate. Of the mixed offspring a portion cling to the fortunes of the mother’s race, and are involved in its fate; but more adhere to those of the white father, share with him the vicissitudes of border life, and cast in their lot with the first nucleus of a settled community. As the border land slowly recedes into the further West, new settlers crowd into the clearing; the little cluster of primitive log-huts grows up into the city, perhaps the capital of a state, and with a new generation the traces of Indian blood are well nigh forgotten. If any portion of the aboriginal owners of the soil linger in the neighbourhood, they are no less affected by the predominant intruding race.
The transfer of the rich prairie lands of the great North-West from the care of Hudson Bay factors and trappers, the organisation of it into the Province of Manitoba, and the territories already in preparation for new provinces, under the government of their own legislatures, has necessarily brought to an end the condition of things so favourable to friendly relations between the White and Red races. The region, moreover, is now traversed by the Canadian Pacific Railway; and the herds of buffalo, on which the Indian mainly depended for his supplies of food, fur robes, and teepe skins, have finally disappeared. Railways, telegraph lines, and other appliances of civilisation are equally incompatible with the existence of the wild buffalo and the wild Indian. The former inevitably vanished from the scene. It remains to be seen if the latter can adapt himself to the novel conditions of such an environment.
As some preparation for the inevitable revolution, the half-breeds, already numbering thousands, accustomed to mingle on perfect equality with the Whites, and trained in some partial degree to agricultural industry, entered on the possession of farms allotted to them by the Government. But such a transitional stage, forced into premature development, could scarcely be expected to pass through all its revolutionary stages without a conflict, and clashing of interests; and the efforts of the Dominion Government to deal with this novel condition of things were only partially successful. But perhaps the most notable feature in the results has been that the chief difficulty was, not with the wild tribes transferred from the management of the fur-traders to the direct jurisdiction of the Government, but with the half-breeds, claiming civil rights, and jealously resenting encroachments on lands appropriated for their own settlement.
The reports of the Indian Department supply interesting glimpses of the process of adjustment with the various tribes of natives reluctantly yielding to the new condition of things. Returns made to an address of the House of Commons at Ottawa, dated March 1873, disclose the jealousies and suspicions of the native tribes, and the anxiety evinced by the Government officials to remove all just grounds of complaint. Mr. Beatty, a contractor for certain surveys on the Upper Assiniboine, reports that the Portage Indians, under their chief, Yellow Quill, had absolutely forbidden any survey of their lands, and driven him and his party off the field. The Lieutenant-Governor thereafter held an interview with Yellow Quill and a party of his braves, and after a long pow-wow succeeded in pacifying him. Again, a party of about two thousand Sioux are reported to have left in high dudgeon, with a threat to return in force next spring; and the Hon. Alexander Morris—now Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba—writes to the Provincial Secretary at Ottawa, that “The Red Lake Indians on the American side have been sending tobacco to the Sioux in our territory, as it is believed, with the view of common action with regard to the Boundary Survey.” For the settlement of provinces, and the surveying of the prairie for disposal to its new occupants, had necessitated the determination of a well-defined boundary between the Canadian territories and those of the United States. Only a few years had elapsed since the State of Minnesota was desolated by a cruel war, carried on by the Sioux at the instigation, as was then affirmed, of Southern agents, with a view to a diversion in favour of the South during the great Civil War. A large number of the Sioux have since crossed the boundary, and settled within the British lines; and the Hon. Mr. Morris writes from Fort Garry in December last: “Some of the Sioux assist the white settlers as labourers in the summer. They have asked for land, and were led to believe that they would be assigned a reserve, and, if so, they would plant crops, and could then be removed from the settlement.” But Mr. Morris specially draws the attention of the provincial authorities to the excited state apparent among all the Western tribes, and adds: “I believe it to be in part created by the Boundary Commission. They do not understand it, and think the two nations are uniting against them.” The difficulties, however, were overcome; and the reports of the Indian agents contain some curious illustrations of the difficulties inevitable in the first attempt at transforming wild Indian tribes into prairie farmers. One of them thus writes: “The full demands of the Indians cannot be complied with; but there is, nevertheless, a certain paradox in asking a wild Indian, who has hitherto gained his livelihood by hunting and trapping, to settle down on a reservation and cultivate the land, without at the same time offering him some means of making his living. As they say themselves: ‘We cannot tear down the trees and build huts with our teeth, we cannot break the prairie with our hands, nor reap the harvest, if we had grown it, with our knives.’ ” But even among the wild tribes of the prairies a great diversity in habits, and in aptitude for the new life now forced upon them as their only chance of survival, is apparent. The Portage Indians clung to their old status as hunters living in their buffalo-skin lodges on the prairies; the St. Peter Indians form permanent settlements, not only of birch-bark wigwams, but many of them have built log-houses for themselves. Even among the tribes already settling down to steady agricultural labour, such as the Saulteux and the Swampies of Manitoba, a very great difference both in sentiments and customs prevail. Thirty-four Indian families from one tribe in Pembina are reported by the agent as demanding their allocation of farms; the chiefs and headmen of other tribes are in negotiation for farming implements, stock, etc., and some of their demands curiously illustrate the form in which the new life thus opening up to them presents its most tempting aspects. Hoes, axes, and other indispensable implements have been readily granted to them. Ploughs, harrows, and oxen are in request, and have been conceded or promised where the Government agent is satisfied that they will be turned to good account. But in special demand is “a bull and cow for each chief, and a boar for each reserve.” The incipient idea of the stock farm is indeed apparent in the universal demand of all: “A promise,” says one of the agents, “which the Indians never omit to mention, that they shall be supplied with a male and female of each animal used by a farmer.” But the transformation of the wild hunter into an industrious agriculturist is a difficult process; and even in the new generation, born under such changed conditions, the Indian boy shows much greater aptitude for mechanical employments; and takes more readily to the work of the carpenter than to that of tilling the soil, which, so long as the Indian was its lord, was practised exclusively by the women of the tribe.
Could the older condition of interblended prairie life have been sufficiently long perpetuated, the results would far more fully have presented results in close analogy to the intermingling of Europe’s aboriginal and Aryan races in prehistoric times. A settlement begun by Lord Selkirk in 1811, was formed on the Red River within the area now embraced in the Province of Manitoba. It consisted of hardy Orkney men and Sutherlandshire Highlanders; and on the amalgamation of the North-West and the Hudson Bay Companies, the settlement received considerable additions to its numbers. When at length the great fur Companies’ supremacy came to an end, the community numbered upwards of two thousand whites, chiefly occupied in farming, or in the service of the Company. At a later date, another settlement was formed on the Assiniboine river, chiefly by French Canadians. In those, as at the forts and trading-posts of the Hudson Bay Company, the settlers consisted chiefly of young men. They had no choice but to wed or cohabit with the Indian women; and the result has been, not only the growth of a half-breed population greatly out-numbering the Whites, but the formation of a tribe of half-breeds, divided into two distinct bands, according to their Scottish or French paternity, who kept themselves distinct in manners, habits, and allegiance, alike from the Whites and the Indians.
This rise of an independent half-breed tribe is one of the most remarkable results of the great, though undesigned, ethnological experiment which has been in progress ever since the meeting of the diverse races of the Old and New World on the continent of America; and when the peculiar circumstances which favoured this result came to an end, it became a matter of great interest to note the most striking phases presented by it, before they are effaced by the influx of European emigration. I accordingly printed and circulated as widely as possible a set of queries relative to the Indian and half-breed population both of Canada and the Hudson Bay territory; and from the returns made to me by Hudson Bay factors, missionaries, and others, most of the following results are derived. The number of the settled population, either half-breed or more or less of Indian blood, in Red River and the surrounding settlements was about 7200. The intermarriage there has been chiefly with Indian women of the plain Crees, though alliances also occur with the Swampies (another branch of the Crees), and with Sioux, Chippeway, and Blackfeet women. But the most noticeable differences are traceable to the white paternity. The French half-breeds have more demonstrativeness and vivacity, but they are reported to take less readily to the steady drudgery of the farm than those of Scotch descent. But, at best, the temptations of a border settlement, with its buffalo hunts and its chief market for peltries, were little calculated to develop the industrious habits of a settled community; and the intrusion of farmers from the old provinces, and immigrants from Europe, ignorant of their habits and wholly indifferent to their interests, necessarily interfered with the healthful process of transformation into a settled industrious community of civilised half-breeds.
Some of the results elicited by the inquiries are of value in their bearing on the question of mixed races, and the apparent tendency to develop permanent varieties; and all the more so as the data thus obtained show the condition of the North-West community immediately prior to the formation of the Province of Manitoba, and the inauguration of the revolution which inevitably followed in its train. The half-breeds are a large and robust race, with greater powers of endurance than the native Indian. Mr. S. J. Dawson, of the Red River Exploring Expedition, speaks of the French half-breeds as a gigantic race as compared with the French Canadians of Lower Canada. Professor Hind refers in equally strong language to their great physical powers and vigorous muscular developments; and the venerable Archdeacon Hunter, of Red River, replied in answer to my inquiry: “In what respects do the half-breed Indians differ from the pure Indians as to habits of life, courage, strength, increase of numbers, etc.?” “They are superior in every respect, both mentally and physically.” Much concurrent evidence points to the fact that the families descended from mixed parentage are larger than those of the whites; and though the results are in some degree counteracted by a tendency to consumption, yet it does not amount to such a source of diminution on the whole as to interfere with their steady numerical increase. One of the questions circulated by me was in this form: “State any facts tending to prove or disprove that the offspring descended from mixed White and Indian blood fails in a few generations.” To this the Rev. J. Gilmour answered: “I know many large and healthy families of partial Indian blood, and have formed the opinion that they are likely to perpetuate a hardy race.” The venerable Archdeacon Hunter, familiar with the facts by long residence as a clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church among the mixed population of the Red River Settlement, answered still more decidedly: “The offspring descended from mixed White and Indian blood does not fail, but, generally speaking, by intermarriages it becomes very difficult to determine whether they are pure Whites or half-breeds.” Living, however, for many years among a people in whom the Indian traits are more or less traceable, it is probable that Archdeacon Hunter is less attracted by the modified, ample black hair, the large full mouth, and the dark, though gentle and softly expressive eye, which strikes a stranger on first coming among any frontier population of mixed blood. The half-breeds also retain much of the reserved and unimpressible manner of the Indian; though a good deal of intercourse with the native race has led me to the conclusion that this is more of an acquired habit than a strictly hereditary trait: a piece of Indian education akin to certain habits of social life universally inculcated among ourselves. When off his guard, the wild Indian betrays great inquisitiveness, and when relaxing over the camp-fire after a laborious day gives free play to mirth and loquacity.
So far, however, much that has been said applies to the mixed population of the Red River Settlement, living on a perfect equality with the white settlers, and constituting an integral part of the colony. They are neither to be confounded with the remarkable tribe of half-breed hunters, nor with the Indians of mixed blood already described, on older Canadian reserves. Remote as this settlement has hitherto been from ordinary centres of colonisation, and inaccessible except through the agency of the Hudson Bay Company, every tendency has been to encourage the introduction of the young adventurer, trapper, or voyageur, rather than the married settler. The habits of life incident to the fur trade made the distinction less marked between the Indian and the white man; and thus a people of peculiar type grew up there as intermediate in habits and mode of life as in blood from those of the old settled provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. Much property is now possessed by men of mixed blood. Their young men have in some cases been sent to the colleges of Canada, and, after creditably distinguishing themselves, have returned to lend their aid in the progress of the settlement. Thus a favourable concurrence of circumstances in all respects tended to give ample opportunity for testing the experiment of intermingling the blood of Europe and America, and raising up a civilised race peculiar to its soil. With the rapid influx of emigrants; the settling of the prairie lands with a population of yeomen farmers; and the rise of villages and towns along the railways and river highways; the ultimate absorption of this half-breed population, and its merging into the homogeneous community that will ultimately be fashioned out of a meeting of very diverse settlers, is inevitable. Icelanders and Danes, Germans, Russians, Italians, French, Highland crofters, and Irish Celts, are all being interfused into the new community of which the half-breed element will form no unimportant factor.
But a greater interest attaches to that other class of half-breeds already alluded to, which the new order of things has inevitably tended to efface, though not necessarily to eradicate, as an element in the population of the future province. Besides the civilised race of half-breeds, mingling on a perfect equality with the Whites; brought up in many cases in full enjoyment of such domestic training as the Hudson Bay factor and hunter could furnish in the wilderness; there remained apart from them a half-breed race, the offspring born to native women as the inevitable results of such a social condition as pertains to the occupants of the forts and trading-posts of that remote region. These half-breed buffalo hunters were wholly distinct from the civilised settlers, and yet more nearly related to them than to the wild Indian tribes. They belonged to the settlement, possessed land, and cultivated farms, though their agricultural labours were very much subordinated to the claims of the chase, and they scarcely aimed at more than supplying their own wants. The two bands numbered in all between 6000 and 7000. Each division had its separate tribal organisation and distinct hunting-grounds, extending beyond the British American frontier. In 1849 the White Horse plain half-breeds on the Strayenne river, Dakota territory, rendered the following returns to an officer appointed to take the census: “700 half-breeds, 200 Indians, 603 carts, 600 horses, 200 oxen, 400 dogs, and 1 cat.” This may illustrate the general character of a people partaking of the nomad habits of the Indian, and yet possessed of a considerable amount of movable property and real estate. They are a hardy race, fearless horsemen, and capable of enduring the greatest privations. They have adopted the Roman Catholic faith, and specially coveted the presence of a priest with them when on their hunting expeditions. The mass was celebrated on the open prairie, and was prized as a guarantee of success in the hunting-field. On such expeditions, it has to be borne in view, they were not tempted by mere love of the chase or by the prospect of a supply of game. Winter-hunting supplies to the trapper the valued peltries of the fur-bearing animals; but they depended on the summer and autumn buffalo hunts for the supply of pemmican, which furnished one of the main resources of the whole Hudson Bay population. The summer hunt kept them abroad on the prairie from about the 15th of June to the end of August, and smaller bands resumed the hunt in the autumn. With this as the favourite and engrossing work of the tribe, it is inevitable that farming could be carried on only in the most desultory fashion. Nevertheless, the severity of the winter compelled them to make provision for the numerous horses and oxen on which the summer hunt depended; and thus habits of industry and forethought were engendered.
The half-breed hunters regarded the Sioux and Blackfeet as their natural enemies, and carried on warfare with them much after the fashion of the Indian tribes that have acquired fire-arms and horses; but they gave proof of their “Christian” civilisation by taking no scalps. In the field, whether preparing for hunting or war, the superiority of the half-breeds was strikingly apparent. They then evinced a discipline, courage, and self-control, of which the wild Sioux, Crees, or Blackfeet are wholly incapable; and they accordingly looked with undisguised contempt on their Indian foes.
Such are some of the most noticeable characteristics of this interesting race, called into being by the contact of the European with the native tribes of the forest and prairie. With so many of the elements of civilisation which it is found so hard to introduce among the most intelligent native tribes, an aptitude for social organisation, and a thorough independence of all external superintendence or control, there seems no reason to doubt that here is an example of an intermediate race, combining characteristics derived from two extremely diverse types of man, with all apparent promise of perpetuity and increase, if they could have been secured in the exclusive occupation of the region in which they have originated. But the railway has traversed the trail of the buffalo; and they have been compelled to make their choice between conformity to the industrial habits of agricultural settlers, or follow the herds of the buffalo in search of some remote wilderness beyond the shriek of the locomotive and the hail of the pioneer immigrant.
The inevitable revolution was not permitted to be inaugurated without very practical protest. The Red River Expedition of Sir Garnet Wolseley in 1870 was directed to put down a revolt of the half-breeds, under their leader, Louis Riel, resolute to oppose the intrusion of immigrant settlers. The struggle was renewed in 1885 under the same leader, but with the more legitimate grievance of neglected land claims, and the assertion of their rights to property in the prairie lands and on the river fronts. They were encountered by a Canadian volunteer force; Batoche, their little urban stronghold, was captured; and the North-West rebellion was brought to an end. But it was freely acknowledged that, poorly armed and ill-provided with the indispensable requisites for meeting a well-organised force of militia, under an experienced British soldier, General Middleton, they displayed unflinching courage, and held out bravely against overwhelming numbers furnished with the deadly appliances of modern warfare.
It could not be supposed that the invasion of the western hemisphere by the wanderers from the later homes of the Aryans beyond the Atlantic could reproduce in all respects the old phenomena that marked the displacement of Europe’s prehistoric races. But making due allowance for the changes wrought on the Aryan stock by the civilising influences of twenty centuries or more; and the consequent disparity between them and the rude hunter tribes of the American forests and prairies; much remains to aid us in the interpretation of the past. Ethnological investigation and induction enable us to realise the condition of Europe when its thinly-dispersed population consisted of a dark-skinned race, small in stature, and, as we may conceive, with hair and eyes of corresponding hue. Sepulchral deposits and the chance disclosures in their old cave-shelters have made us familiar with their physical form. Their modern representatives survive on the outskirts of Europe’s civilised centres. Still more, their ethnical characteristics have been perpetuated by the very same process as may now be seen in progress in the frontier states of America and the newest provinces of the Canadian Dominion. Not only are the modern representatives of Europe’s Allophyliæ to be found among the Lapps, Finns, and the Iberians of Northern and Western Europe; but everywhere in the British Isles, and throughout Western Europe, the Melanochroic elements stand out distinctly from the predominant Xanthocroic stock, among a people unconscious of any diversity of race. Here then we see evidences of the intermingling and the partial absorption of the Australioid savage of prehistoric Europe by the later Xanthocroi, the product of which survives in the brunette of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. In Britain the contrasting characteristics of the diverse ethnical elements attracted the attention of Tacitus in the first century of our era. In Spain the Iberian still preserves the evidence of an individuality apart from the Indo-European races in the vernacular Euskara, while a large Moorish element in the southern portion of the peninsula perpetuates the results of another foreign intrusion and interblending of races within historic times.
The diversity apparent in some of the results of the meeting of dissimilar races in the Old World and the New, is due to the geographical characteristics of the two hemispheres. Alike by sea and land, Europe could be entered by invading colonists, gradually, and at many diverse points. Hence, the aggression of the higher races may be assumed to have begun while the difference between them and the aborigines of Europe was much less than that which distinguishes the European from the Bed Indian savage. The conquest would thus be protracted over a period probably of many generations, and so would involve no such collisions as inevitably result in the destruction of savage races when brought into abrupt contact with those far advanced in civilisation.
But the peculiar relations of the frontier populations of the New World, and especially of the factors, trappers, and voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, with the native tribes, helped to create a partial equality between the civilised European and the savage, and so to beget results akin to those which have left such enduring evidences of the mingling of diverse races in the population of Europe.
This accordingly suggests a question affecting the whole relations of British and European colonists generally to the native population of new lands settled and colonised by them. Not only English, Scotch, and Irish, but German, Norwegian, Icelandic, French, Polish, Russian, and Italian emigrants flock in thousands to the New World, merge in the common stock, and in the third generation learn to speak of themselves as “Anglo-Saxon!” The investigations of ethnologists have well-nigh put an end to the supposed purity of an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Scandinavian population in all but the assumed purely Celtic areas of the British Islands; and the latest system of ethnical classification is based on the recognition of the survival in the mixed population of modern Britain of a race-element which still perpetuates an enduring influence derived from aborigines of Europe anterior to the advent of Celt or Teuton. The power of absorption and assimilation of a predominant race is great; and ethnological displacement is no more necessarily a process of extinction now than in primitive times; though intermixture must ever be most easily effected where the ethnical distinctions are least strongly marked, and the conditions of civilisation are nearly akin.
The permanent survival of a disparate type in America perpetuating the evidences of the interblending of the Red and White races may be doubted. That some ineffaceable results will remain I cannot doubt; but the enormous disparity in numbers between the millions of European nationalities, and the little remnant of the native race brought in contact with them, precludes the possibility of results such as have perpetuated in the modern races of Europe elements derived from some of its earliest savage tribes.
It has indeed been such a favourite idea with some physiologists that in the undoubted developments of something like a distinct Anglo-American type, there is a certain approximation to the Indian, that Dr. Carpenter, in his Essay on the Varieties of Mankind, lays claim to originality in the idea “that the conformation of the cranium seems to have undergone a certain amount of alteration, even in the Anglo-Saxon race of the United States, which assimilates it in some degree to that of the aboriginal inhabitants.” This he dwells on in some detail, and arrives at what he seems to regard as an indisputable conclusion, that the peculiar American physiognomy to which he adverts presents a transition, however slight, toward that of the North American Indian. But the long-cherished opinion, to which Dr. Morton gave currency, of the existence of one special type of skull-form common to the whole aborigines of America, has been abandoned by all who have given any attention to the evidence which Dr. Morton’s own Crania Americana supplies. I doubt if the idea of such an approximation of the Anglo-American to the Red Indian type would ever have occurred to a physiologist of Canada or of New England, to whom abundant opportunities for comparing the Indian and Anglo-American features, and of noting the actual transitional forms between the two, are accessible. But if such examples can be clearly recognised, they may be assigned with probability to a reverting to the type of some Bed ancestress whose blood is transmitted to a late descendant.
But it is otherwise with the millions of the Coloured race who now constitute the indigenous population of the Southern States. They are at home there in a climate to which the White race adapts itself with very partial success. The offspring of white fathers and of mothers of the African races, they have multiplied to millions; and now with the recently acquired rights of citizenship, and with the advantages of education within their reach, the country is their own. The very social prejudices against miscegenation protect them from the effacing influences to which the Indian half-breed is exposed by ever recurrent intermarriage with the dominant race. As yet, there are discernible the various degrees of heredity from the Mulatto to the Quinteron. But the abolishing of slavery has placed the Coloured race on an entirely new footing; and left as it now is, free to enjoy the healthful social relations of a civilised community, and protected by the very prejudices of race and caste from any large intermixture with the White race, it can scarcely admit of doubt that there will survive on the American continent a Melanocroi of its own, more distinctly separated from the White race, not only by heredity, but also by climatic influences, than the “dark Whites” of Europe are from the blonde types of Hellenic, Slavic, Teutonic, or Scandinavian stocks.
| [148] | Reisen in Lykien, etc., Vienna, 1889. |
| [149] | Vide History of the Negro Race in America. G. W. Williams. |
| [150] | Science, Feb. 13, 1891. A. F. Chamberlain. |
| [151] | See p. 290. |
VIII
RELATIVE RACIAL BRAIN-WEIGHT AND SIZE
Consistently with the recognition of the brain as the organ of intellectual activity, it seems not unnatural to assume for man, as the rational animal, a very distinctive cerebral development. One of the most distinguished of living naturalists, Professor Owen, has even made this organ the basis of a system of classification, by means of which he separates man into a sub-class, distinct from all other mammalia. But while a comparison between man and the anthropoid apes, as the animals most nearly approximating to him in physical structure, lends confirmation to the idea not only that a well-developed brain is essential to natural activity, but that there is a close relation between the development of the brain and the manifestation of intellectual power; the distinctive features in the human brain, as compared with those of the anthropomorpha, prove to be greatly less than had been assumed under imperfect knowledge. The substantial difference is in volume. “No one, I presume,” says Darwin, “doubts that the large size of the brain in man, relatively to his body, in comparison to that of the gorilla or orang, is closely connected with his higher mental powers”;[[152]] and it might not unfairly be reasoned from analogy, that the same test distinguishes the intellectual man from the stolid, and the civilised man from the savage. A careful study of the subject, however, shows some remarkable deviations from such a scale of progression. Attention is indeed directed to greatly more ample proofs of inequality between the organic source of power and the manifestations of mental energy; as, for example, in the ant, with its cerebral ganglia not so large as the quarter of a small pin’s head, displaying instincts and apparent affections of wonderful intensity and compass. Viewed in this aspect, “the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more marvellous than the brain of man.” Here, however, we look on elements of contrast rather than analogy; and seek in vain in this direction for any appreciable test of the soundness of the popular belief in the size of the brain as a measure of intellectual power. It is otherwise when we turn to the anthropomorpha. There, alike in the scientific and in the popular creed, very special and exceptional affinities to man are admitted; and a careful study of their anatomical structure tends to increase the recognised points of analogy.
Mr. Lockhart Clarke, in a contribution to Dr. Maudsley’s work on the Physiology and Pathology of Mind, gives a minute description of the concentric layers of nervous substance which combine to form the convolutions of the human brain; and of the forms and disposition of the various nerve-cells of which its vesicular structure consists. Comparing the human brain with those of other animals, he says: “Between the cells of the convolutions in man and those of the ape tribe I could not perceive any difference whatever; but they certainly differ in some respects from those of the larger mammalia: from those, for instance, of the ox, sheep, or cat.”[[153]] Apart from the difference in volume (55 to 115 cubic inches), the only distinctive features, according to Professor Huxley, between the brain of the anthropomorpha and that of man, are “the filling up of the occipito-temporal fissure; the greater complexity and less symmetry of the other sulci and gyri; the less excavation of the orbital face of the frontal lobe; and the larger size of the cerebral hemispheres, as compared with the cerebellum and the cerebral nerves.”
The brain of the orang is the one which seems most nearly to approximate to that of man. In volume it is about 26 or 27 cubic inches; or about half the minimum size of a normal human brain. The frontal height is greater than in that of other anthropomorpha; the frontal lobe is in all respects larger as compared with the occipital lobe; and certain folds of brain-substance, styled “bridging convulsions,” which in the human brain are interposed between the parietal and occipital lobes, also occur, though greatly reduced, in the brain of the orang; while they appear to be wholly wanting in the chimpanzee, the gibbon, and other apes which superficially present a greater resemblance to man. Referring to the convolutions of the central cerebral lobe, Huschke says: “With their formation in the ape, the brain enters the last stage of development until it arrives at its perfection in man”; and the higher class of brains may be arranged between the extremes of poorly and richly convoluted examples.
But it must not be overlooked that, apart from structural differences, relative, and not absolute mass and weight of brain has to be considered, otherwise the elephant and the whale would take the foremost place. “The brain of the porpoise,” Professor Huxley remarks,[[154]] “is quite wonderful for its mass, and for the development of the cerebral convolutions”; but it is the centre of a nervous system of corresponding capacity, while as compared with the size of the animal, the brain is not relatively large. Vogt states the weight of the human body to be to the brain, on an average, as 36 to 1; whereas in the most intelligent animals the difference is rarely less than 100 to 1.
Assuming the existence of some uniform relation between the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties, along with whatever is recognised as most closely analogous to them in the lower animals, it might be anticipated that we should find not only a graduated development of brain in the anthropomorpha as they approximate in resemblance to man; but, still more, that the progressive stages from the lowest savage condition to that of the most civilised nations should be traceable in a comparative size and weight of brain. Dr. Carl Vogt, after discussing certain minor and doubtful exceptions, thus proceeds: “We find that there is an almost regular series in the cranial capacity of such nations and races as, since historic times, have taken no part in civilisation. Australians, Hottentots, and Polynesians, nations in the lowest state of barbarism, commence the series; and no one can deny that the place they occupy in relation to cranial capacity and cerebral weight corresponds with the degree of their intellectual capacity and civilisation.”[[155]] But the position thus confidently assigned to the Polynesians receives no confirmation from the evidence supplied by the measurements of Dr. J. B. Davis, in his Thesaurus Craniorum; and a careful study of the subject reveals other remarkable deviations from such a scale of progression, not only in individuals but in races. To these exceptional deviations, with their bearing on the comparative capacity of races, the following remarks are chiefly directed. The largest and heaviest brains do indeed appear, for the most part, to pertain to the nations highest in civilisation, and to the most intelligent of their number. But this cannot be asserted as a uniform law, either in relation to races or individuals. The more carefully the requisite evidence is accumulated, the less does it appear that the volume of brain, or the cubic contents of the skull, supply a uniform gauge of intellectual capacity. In the researches which have thus far been instituted into the characteristics of the human brain among the lowest races, the development is in many respects remarkable; and, as was to be expected, no organic differences between diverse races of men have been traced.
Professor C. Luigi Calori has published the results of a careful examination of the brain of a negro of Guinea. It presented the marked excess of length over breadth so characteristic of the negro cranium; but in other respects it corresponded generally to the fully developed European brain. The distribution of the white and gray substances was the same; the cerebral convolutions were collected into an equal number of lobes; and the only special difference was that the convolutions were a little less frequently folded, and the separating sulci somewhat less marked than in the average European brain. But even in those respects the complication was great. The actual weight of the brain, according to Professor Calori, was 1260 grammes, equivalent to 44.4 cubic inches. The complexity of convolution, and consequent extension of superficies of the encephalon, appears to be an essential element in the development of the brain as the organ of highest mental capacity; and to the cerebrum, apparently, the true functions of intellectual activity pertain. Professor Wagner undertook the measurement of the convex surface of the frontal lobe in a series of brains. The heaviest, as a rule, had also the greatest development of surface. But the two elements were not in uniform ratio. Some of the lighter brains presented a much greater degree of convolution and consequent extent of convex superficies than others which ranked above them in weight. It is thus apparent that in estimating the comparative characteristics of brains, various elements are necessary for an exhaustive comparison. Besides the functional differences of the cerebrum, cerebellum, and pons varolii, they have different specific gravities, so that brains of equal weight may differ widely in quality. Dr. Peacock, taking distilled water as 1000, gives the values of the subdivisions of the brain thus: cerebrum, 1034; cerebellum, 1041; pons varolii, 1040. Again, Dr. Sankey states the mean specific gravity of the gray matter of the brain in either sex as 1034.6, and of the white matter as 1041.2. The variations from these results, as given by Bastian, Thurnam, and others, are trifling. But it is significant to note that recent researches show that where greater specific gravity of brain occurs in the insane, it appears to be limited to the gray matter.[[156]] Professor Goodsir maintained that symmetry of brain has more to do with the higher faculties than bulk of form. It is, at any rate, apparent that two brains of equal weight may differ widely in quality.
Nevertheless, the popular estimate embodied in such expressions as “a good head,” “a long-headed fellow,” and “a poor head,” like many other popular inductions, has truth for its basis. Up to a certain stage the growth of the brain determines the capacity of the skull. Then it seems as though more complex convolutions accompanied the packing of the elaborated cerebral mass within the fixed limits of its osseous chamber.
A comparison of races, based on minute investigation of an adequate number of brains of fair typical examples, may be expected to yield important results; but in the absence of such direct evidence, the chief data available for this purpose are derived from measurements of the internal capacity of their skulls. Among English observers who have devoted themselves to this class of observations, the foremost place is due to Dr. J. Barnard Davis, who, in 1867, summed up the results of his extensive researches in a contribution to the Royal Society, entitled “Contributions towards determining the Weight of the Brain in different Races of Man.”[[157]] Inferior as such evidence must necessarily be, if compared with the examination of the brain itself, nevertheless the number of skulls of the different races gauged unquestionably furnishes some highly valuable data for ethnical comparison. The evidence, moreover, is obtained from a source in some respects less variable than the encephalon; and will always constitute a corrective element in estimating results based on direct examinations of the brain. Dr. Davis, indeed, claims “that the examination of a large series of skulls in ascertaining their capacities and deducing from those capacities the average volume of the brain, affords in some respects more available data for determining this relative volume for any particular race than the weighing of the brain itself.” The defect is, that its most important results are necessarily based on the assumption of a uniform density of brain; whereas some notable ethnical differences, hereafter referred to, may prove to be due to the fact that certain races derive their special characteristics from a prevailing diversity in this very respect.
But the extensive observations of Dr. Davis, as of Dr. Morton, have a special value from the fact that each furnishes results based on a uniform system of observation; for the diverse methods and materials employed by different observers in gauging the human skull have greatly detracted from their practical value. In a communication by the late Professor Jeffreys Wyman to the Boston Natural History Society,[[158]] he presented the results of a series of measurements of the internal capacity of the same skull with pease, beans, rice, flax-seed, shot, and coarse and fine sand. From repeated experiments he arrived at the conclusion that the apparent capacity varied according to the different substances used, so that the same skull measured respectively, with pease 1193 centimetres, with shot 1201.8, with rice 1220.2, and with fine sand 1313 centimetres. Professor Wyman was led to the conclusion that, for exactness, small shot, as employed latterly by Dr. Morton, is preferable to sand, were it not for its weight, which, in the case of old and fragile skulls, is apt to be destructive to them. With a view to avoid the latter evil, Dr. J. B. Davis has used fine Calais sand of 1.425 specific gravity. The diversity in apparent volume, consequent on the employment of different substances in gauging the internal capacity of the skull, necessarily detracts from the value of comparative results of Morton, Davis, and others. But the elaborate measurements of their great collections of human crania furnish reliable series of data, each uniform in system, and sufficiently minute to satisfy many requirements of comparative craniometry and approximate cerebral development.
Without assuming an invariable correspondence in cubical capacity and brain-weight, there is a sufficient approximation in the cubical capacity of the skull and the average weight of the encephalon to render the deductions derived from gauging the capacities of skulls of different races an important addition to this department of comparative ethnology. For minute cerebral comparisons, however, it is apparent that much more is required; and the special functions assigned to the various organs within the cranium have to be kept in view. Of these the medulla oblongata, in direct contact with the spinal cord, is now recognised as the centre of the vital actions in breathing and swallowing; and is believed also to be the direct source of the muscular action employed in speech. Next to it are the sensory ganglia, arranged in pairs along the base of the brain. To the cerebellum, which the phrenologist sets apart as the source of the emotions and passions embraced in his terminology of amativeness, philoprogenitiveness, etc., physiologists now assign the function of conveying to the mind the conditions of tension and relaxation of the muscles, and so controlling their voluntary action. But above all those is the cerebrum, or brain-proper, consisting of two large lobes of nervous substance, which in man are so large that, when viewed vertically, they cover and conceal the cerebellum. To this organ is specially assigned emotion, volition, and ratiocination. It is the assumed seat of the mind; and, in a truer sense than the skull—
The dome of thought, the palace of the soul;
if indeed it be not, to one class of reasoners, the mind itself. Certain it is that no acute disease can affect it without a corresponding disorder of the functions of mind; and with this organ much below the average size, intellectual weakness may always be predicated. But at the same time, it is significant to note that the human brain, stinted in its full proportions, and reduced to a seeming equality with the anthropomorpha, exhibits no corresponding capacities or instincts in lieu of the higher mental qualities. Microcephaly is the invariable index, not of mere limited intelligence and mental capacity, but of actual mental imbecility. If the augmentation of the brain of the anthropomorpha from 55 to 115 cubic inches be all that is requisite for the transformation of the irrational ape into the reasoning man, it would seem to be in no degree illogical to look for the accompaniment of the inversion of the process by an approximation, in some instances, to certain capacities and functions of the ape. But there are no indications of this. In some examples of microcephaly, the so-called animal propensities do indeed manifest themselves to excess; but there is no reproduction of the animal nature, instincts, or capacities, analogous to the scale of cerebral development of the orang or chimpanzee. A microcephalous idiot, who died at the age of twenty-two, in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, had a brain weighing only 13.125 oz., or 372 grammes. In describing this case, Professor Owen remarks: “Here nature may be said to have performed for us the experiment of arresting the development of the brain almost exactly at the size which it attains in the chimpanzee, and where the intellectual faculties were scarcely more developed. Yet no anatomist would hesitate in at once referring the cranium to the human species.” And so is it with the encephalon. The brain of the chimpanzee is a healthy, well-developed organ, adequate to the amplest requirements of the animal; whereas the microcephalous human brain is inadequate for any efficient, continuous cerebral activity: not merely limited in its range of powers. Much, however, may yet be learned from a careful attention to the imperfect manifestations of activity in certain directions, in cases of microcephalic idiocy, and noting the predominant tendency in each case, with a view to subsequent examination of the brain. By this means it may be found possible to refer certain forms of mental activity to special variations in the structure of the organ, or to distinct members of the encephalon.
Dr. Laennec exhibited to the Anthropological Society of Paris a microcephalous idiot of the male sex, aged fourteen years. “This child is entirely unconscious of his own actions, and his intellectual operations are very few in number, and very rudimentary. His language consists of two syllables, oui and la, and he takes an evident pleasure in pronouncing them. He takes no heed in what direction he walks. He would step off a precipice, or into a fire.” Attention was specially directed to the idiot’s hands: “The thumbs are atrophied, and cannot be opposed to the other fingers. The palms of the hands have the transverse creases, but not the diagonal—the result of the atrophy of the thumbs. Hence the hand resembles that of the chimpanzee. The dentition too is defective. Though fourteen years of age, the child has only twelve teeth.” Here it is curious to note the analogies in physical structure to the lower anthropomorpha in other organs besides the brain, for it only renders more striking the absence of any corresponding aptitudes.
Dr. J. Barnard Davis, in his interesting monograph on Synostotic Crania among Aboriginal Races of Man, produces some remarkable illustrations of the effect of premature ossification of the sutures of the skull in arresting the full development of the brain, and so rendering it unequal to the due performance of its functions. “I have,” he says, “the cranium of a convict who was executed on Norfolk Island, which I owe to the kindness of Admiral H. M. Denham. This man was executed there when that beautiful isle was appropriated to the reception of the most dangerous and irreclaimable convicts from the other penal settlements. It is a microcephalic skull, rather dolichocephalic, of a man apparently about forty years of age. It exhibits a perfect ossification of the sagittal and of the greater portion of the lambdoidal sutures. The coronal suture is partially obliterated at the sides in the temporal regions, and can only be distinguished by faint traces in all its middle parts. In this case there has not been any compensatory development of moment in other directions. The calvarium is not abridged in its length, which is 7.1 inches, equal to 179 millimetres; probably it is a little elongated. It is, however, very narrow being only 4.8 inches, or 122 mm. at its widest part, between the temporal bones. So that the result is a very small, dwarfed, almost cylindrical calvarium. The internal capacity is only 59 ounces of sand,[[159]] which is equal to 71.4 cubic inches, or 1169 cubic centimetres.” Here is a skull considerably below the lowest mean of the crania of any race in Morton’s enlarged tables, or in the more comprehensive ones furnished in Dr. Davis’s Thesaurus Craniorum. Another skull nearly approximating to it is that of a Cole, one of the savage tribes of Nagpore, in Central India, who are said to go entirely naked. It is described in the supplement to the Thesaurus Craniorum as that of “Chara,” a Cole farmer, aged fifty, and its internal capacity is stated as 59.5 oz. av., equivalent to 71.7 cubic inches. The Coles appear to be small of stature. The heights of three of them, whose skulls are in the same collection, were respectively 5 ft. 5 in., 5 ft. 2 in., and 5 ft., and the average internal capacity of five male skulls is only 66.6. The small stature in this and others of the native races of Central India, has to be taken into account in estimating the relative size of the brain. But, after making all due allowance for this, the Cole skulls are remarkable for their small size, being smaller even than the ordinary Hindoos of Bengal. Yet one of them, “Cootlo,” whose skull is among those included in the above mean, commanded a band of insurgents in the Porahant rebellion of 1858, and made himself a terror to the district.
The microcephalism of races, as well as of individuals, of small stature, must not be confounded with the true microcephaly of a dwarfed or imperfectly developed brain, which is invariably accompanied with mental imbecility. The Mincopies of the Andaman Islands are spoken of by Professor Owen as “perhaps the most primitive, or lowest in the scale of civilisation, of the human race.”[[160]] Mr. G. E. Dobson, in describing his first visit to one of their “homes,” says: “Although none of the tribe exceeded 64 inches in height, so that on first seeing them we thought the shed contained none but boys and girls, I was especially struck by the remarkable contrast between the size of the males and females.”[[161]] Dr. J. B. Davis has given, in the supplement to Thesaurus Craniorum, the dimensions of a male Mincopie skeleton in his collection. The age he assumes to have been about thirty-five. The internal capacity of the skull is 62 oz. (Calais sand), equivalent to 75.5 cubic inches, and the entire height of the skeleton is 58.7 inches. It belongs, says Dr. Davis, to a pigmy race, is small in all its dimensions, and is particularly small in the dimensions of the pelvis. Of their skulls, moreover, he adds, “it is somewhat difficult to determine the sex with confidence. They are all small (but this is a character of the race), they are delicate in development, and they have that fulness of the occipital region, and smallness of the mastoid processes, which are marks of femininism.”
Mr. Alfred R. Wallace connects the Mincopies with the Negritos and Semangs of the Malay peninsula, a dark woolly-haired race, dwarfs in stature. Dr. Davis says of the six Mincopie skulls in his collection, four male and two female, as well as of others which he has seen: “They are all remarkably and strikingly alike, not merely in size but in form also. They are all small, round, brachycephalic crania of beautiful form.” Moreover, though classed as “lowest in the scale of civilisation,” the Mincopies betray no deficiency of intellect. The admirable photographs which illustrate Mr. Dobson’s narrative show in the majority of them good frontal development. The brain is not, indeed, relatively small. Their canoes are made of the trunk of a tree, hollowed out; and Mr. Dobson remarks: “The construction of their peculiar arrows and fish-spears with movable heads exhibits much ingenuity, and the use of no small reasoning power in adapting means to an end.”
We are indeed too apt to apply our own artificial standards as the sole test of intellectual vigour; whereas it is probable that in the amount of acquired knowledge and acuteness of reasoning many savage races surpass the majority of the illiterate peasantry in the most civilised countries of Europe. Mr. Wallace, in viewing the subject in one special light, remarks: “The brain of the lowest savages, and, as far as we yet know, of the prehistoric races, is little inferior in size to that of the higher types of man, and is immensely superior to that of the higher animals; while it is universally admitted that quantity of brain is one of the most important, and probably the most essential of the elements which determine mental power. Yet the mental requirements of savages, and the faculties actually exercised by them, are very little above those of animals. The higher feelings of pure morality and refined emotion, and the power of abstract reasoning and ideal conception, are useless to them; are rarely, if ever, manifested; and have no important relations to their habits, wants, desires, and well-being. They possess a mental organ beyond their needs.”[[162]]
Here, however, it may be well to guard against the confusion of two very distinct elements. The higher feelings of pure morality and refined emotion are not manifestations of intellectual vigour in the same sense as is the power of abstract reasoning and ideal conception. It is not rare to find an English or Scottish peasant with little intellectual culture or capacity for abstract reasoning, but with an acutely instinctive moral sense. On the other hand, among the criminal class, it is by no means rare to find examples of wonderfully vigorous intellectual power applied to the planning and accomplishing of schemes which involve as much foresight and skill as many a triumph of diplomacy; but which at the same time seem to be nearly incompatible with any moral sense. Moreover, it is needless to say that intellectual vigour and high moral principle are by no means invariable concomitants in any class of society; nor can they be traced to a common source. Mr. Wallace recognises that “a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose”; and such guidance involves much more than the mere evolution of a higher animal organisation. But, appreciating as he does the difficulties involved in any acceptance of a theory of evolution which assumes man to be the mere latest outgrowth of a development from lower forms of animal life, Mr. Wallace points out that “natural selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher.”
Yet neither Mr. Wallace, nor Professor Huxley when controverting this argument, withholds a due recognition of the activity of the intellect of the savage. No one indeed can have much intercourse with savage races wholly dependent on their own resources without recognising that, within a certain range, their faculties are kept in constant activity. The savage hunter has not merely an intimate familiarity with all the capabilities and resources of many regions traversed by him in pursuit of his game; his geographical information includes much useful knowledge of the topography of ranges of country which he has never visited. I found, on one occasion, when exploring the Nepigon River, on Lake Superior, that my Chippeway guides, though fully 500 miles from their own country, and visiting the region for the first time, were nevertheless on the lookout for a metamorphic rock underlying the syenite which abounds there; and they made their way by well-recognised land-marks to this favourite “pipestone rock.” While moreover the Indian, like other savages, is devoid of much of what we style “useful knowledge,” but which would be very useless to him, he is fully informed on many subjects embraced within the range of the natural sciences; and has a very practical knowledge of meteorology, zoology, botany, and much else which constitutes useful knowledge to him. He is familiar with the habits of animals, and the medicinal virtues of many plants; will find his way through the forest by noting the special side of the trunks on which certain lichens grow; and follow the tracks of his game, or discover the nests of birds, by indications which would escape the most observant naturalist. The Australian savage, stimulated apparently to an unwonted ingenuity by the privations of an arid climate, is the inventor of two wonderfully ingenious implements, the wommera or throwing stick, and the bomerang, which, when employed by the native expert, accomplish feats entirely beyond any efforts of European skill. Moreover, as Professor Huxley remarks, he “can make excellent baskets and nets, and neatly fitted and beautifully balanced spears; he learns to use these so as to be able to transfix a quartern loaf at sixty yards; and very often, as in the case of the American Indians, the language of a savage exhibits complexities which a well-trained European finds it difficult to master.” Again he goes on to say: “Consider that every time a savage tracks his game he employs a minuteness of observation, and an accuracy of inductive and deductive reasoning which, applied to other matters, would assure some reputation to a man of science, and I think we need ask no further why he possesses such a fair supply of brains. In complexity and difficulty, I should say that the intellectual labour of a good hunter or warrior considerably exceeds that of an ordinary Englishman.” Hence Professor Huxley is not prepared to admit that the American or Australian savage possesses in his brain a mental organ which he fails to turn to full account. But without entering on the questions of evolution and natural selection in all their comprehensive bearings, it is still apparent that the brain of the savage is an instrument of great capacity, employed within narrow limits.
In estimating the comparative size of the brain, it is seen to be necessary to discriminate between individuals or races of small stature and cases of true microcephaly. On the other hand, it is not to be overlooked that examples of idiocy are not rare where the head is of a fair average size, and where the mental imbecility is regarded as congenital. But in this as in other researches of the physiologist, he is limited in his observations mainly to the chance opportunities which offer for study; and not unfrequently the prejudices of affection arrest the hand of the student, and prevent a post-mortem examination in cases where science has much to hope for from freedom of investigation. Hence the data thus far accumulated in evidence of the actual structure, size, and weight, of the human brain fall far short of what is requisite for a solution of many questions in reference to the relations between cerebration and mental activity. From time to time men of science have sought by example, as well as by precept, to lessen such impediments to scientific research. Dr. Dalton left instructions for a post-mortem examination in order to test the peculiarity of his vision, which he had assumed to be due to a colouring of the vitreous humour; Jeremy Bentham bequeathed his body to his friend Dr. Southwood Smith, for the purposes of anatomical science; and the will of Harriet Martineau contained this provision: “It is my desire, from an interest in the progress of scientific investigation, that my skull should be given to Henry George Atkinson, of Upper Gloucester Place, London, and also my brain, if my death should take place within such distance of his then present abode as to enable him to have it for purposes of scientific investigation.” The will is dated March 10, 1864; but by a codicil, dated October 5, 1871, this direction is revoked, with the explanation which follows in these words: “I wish to leave it on record that this alteration in my testamentary directions is not caused by any change of opinion as to the importance of scientific observation on such subjects, but is made in consequence merely of a change of circumstances in my individual case.” The natural repugnance of surviving relatives to any mutilation of the body must always tend to throw impediments in the way of such researches; though it may be anticipated that, with the increasing diffusion of knowledge, such obstacles to its pursuit will be diminished. Thus far, however, notwithstanding the persevering labours of Welcker, Bergmann, Parchappe, Broca, Boyd, Skae, Owen, Thurnam, and other physiologists, their observations have been necessarily limited almost exclusively to certain exceptional sources of evidence, embracing to a large extent only the pauper and the insane classes; and in the case of the latter especially, the functional disorder or chronic disease of the organ under consideration renders it peculiarly desirable that such results should be brought, as far as possible, into comparison with a corresponding number of observations on healthy brains of a class fairly representing the social and intellectual status of a civilised community.
The average brain-weight of the human adult, as determined by a numerous series of observations, ranges for man from 40 oz. to 52½ oz., and for woman from 35 oz. to 47½ oz. But some indications among ancient crania tend to suggest a doubt as to whether this difference in cerebral capacity was a uniformly marked sexual distinction among early races; due allowance being made for difference in stature. Dr. Thurnam made the race of the British Long Barrows a special subject of study; and Dr. Rolleston followed up his researches with valuable results. Amongst other points, he noted that the males appear to have averaged 5 ft. 6 in., and the females 4 ft. 10 in. in height. But while the difference of stature between the male and the female exceeds what is observable in most modern races, the variation in the size and internal capacity of their skulls appears to be less than among civilised races. The like characteristics are noticeable in the larger race of Europe’s Palæolithic era. Nothing is more striking in the discovery of those ancient remains of European man than the remarkable development of the skulls and the good brain capacity of the race of the palæotechnic dawn, where man is proved, by his works of art and all the traces of his hearth and home, to have been still a rude hunter and cave-dweller. The Canstadt type of skull is assumed to be that of the earliest European race of which traces have thus far been discovered; and it is unquestionably markedly inferior in development to that of the artistic Troglodytes of the French Reindeer period. Yet remarkable examples of atavism, as in the skull of St. Mansuy, the missionary bishop of Toul, in Lorraine, in the fourth century, and in that of Robert the Bruce, show a reversion to this early type, in accompaniment with exceptional intellectual capacity. The Neanderthal skull, an extreme example of the primitive type, is pronounced by Professor Schaaffhausen to be the most brutal of all human skulls; though this impression is mainly due to the abnormal development of the superciliary ridges, in which it undoubtedly approximates to the chimpanzee or the gorilla. But it has an estimated capacity of 75 cubic inches, and a corresponding cerebral development in no degree incompatible with the idea that the remains recovered from the Neanderthal cave may be those of a skilled hunter; and one apt in the ingenious arts of the primitive tool-maker.
Whatever other changes, therefore, may have affected the brain as the organ of human thought and reasoning, it does not thus far appear that the average mass of brain has greatly increased since the advent of European man. Important exceptions have indeed been noted. Professor Broca’s observations on the cerebral capacity of the Parisian population at different periods, based on nearly 400 skulls derived from vaults and cemeteries of dates from the eleventh or twelfth to the nineteenth century, appear to him to show a progressive cerebral development in that centre of European civilisation.[[163]] But though the assumption is not inconsistent with other results of civilisation, and is the necessary corollary of the postulate that intellectual activity tends to development of brain, the fact that the crania presented a still greater diversity in type than in size reminds us of the intermixture of races on the banks of the Seine, and the consequent necessity for much more extended observations before so important a deduction can be received as an established truth.
Taking the average brain-weight of the human adult as already stated, all male brains falling much below 40 oz. or 1130 grammes, and female brains below 35 oz. or 990 grammes, may be classed as microcephalous; and all above the maxima of the medium male and female brain, viz. 52½ oz. or 1480 grammes, and 47½ oz. or 1345 grammes, may be ranked as megalocephalous, or great brains.
Professor Welcker, who devoted special attention to the whole subject under review, assumes another and simpler test when he says that skulls of more than 540 to 550 millimetres, or 21.26 to 21.65 inches in circumference—the weight of brain belonging to which is 1490 to 1560 grammes (52.5-55 oz. av.)—are to be regarded as exceptionally large. But while an excess of horizontal circumference may be accepted as indicating good cerebral capacity, it must not be overlooked that the adoption of it as the key to any definite or even approximate brain-weight ignores the important elements of variation involved in the difference between acrocephalic and platycephalic head-forms. The volume of brain in Scott, and probably in Shakespeare, appears to have depended more on its elevation than its horizontal expansion. The same was also the case with Byron. The intermastoid arch, measured across the vertex of the skull from the tip of one mastoid process to the other, furnishes an accurate gauge of this development. Of thirteen selected male English skulls in Dr. Davis’s collection, the mean of this measurement is 15.1; and of thirty-nine male and female English skulls, it is only 14.4. Of the whole number of eighty-one English skulls described in the Thesaurus Craniorum, three exceptionally large ones are: No. 123, that of an ancient British chief, of fully 6 ft. 2 in. in stature, from the Grimsthorpe Barrow, Yorkshire; No. 905, a calvarium of great magnitude, very brachycephalic, and with the elevation across the middle of the parietals apparently exaggerated by compression in infancy, from Hythe, Kent; and No. 1029, another male skull, remarkable alike for its size and weight, and with a peculiarity of conformation ascribed by Dr. Davis to synostosis of the coronal suture. The intermastoid arch in those exceptionally large skulls measures respectively 16.0, 16.2, and 16.9, whereas the same measurement derived from the cast of Scott’s head taken after death, yields the extraordinary dimensions of 19 inches. This last measurement is over the hairy scalp. But after making ample allowance for this, the vertical measurement of the skull and consequently of the brain is remarkable.
Full value has been assigned at all periods to the well-developed forehead. It is characteristic of man. The physiognomist and the phrenologist have each given significance to it in their respective systems; and it has received no less prominent recognition from the poets. A fully developed forehead is assumed as distinctive of the male skull. But Juliet, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when depreciating her rival, exclaims, “Ay, but her forehead’s low”; and the jealous Queen of Egypt, in Antony and Cleopatra, is told of Octavia that “her forehead is as low as she would wish it.” “The fair large front” of Milton’s perfect man is the external index of an ample cerebrum: the organ to which the seat of consciousness, intelligence, and will is assigned. It is therefore consistent with this that a low, retreating forehead is popularly assumed to be the characteristic index of the savage, and of the unintellectual among civilised races. But the cerebral characteristics of both ancient and modern civilised races have still to be studied in detail; and the influence of race and sex on the form of the head and the mass and weight of the brain, involves some curious questions in relation to the oldest illustrations of the physical characteristics of man, and to the effect of civilisation on the relative development of the sexes.
Early observations led Dr. Pruner-Bey and other ethnologists of France to recognise in certain ancient Gaulish skulls of a brachycephalic type the evidences of a primitive race, assumed to represent the inhabitants of France and of Central Europe during its Reindeer period, and which appeared to be assigned with reasonable probability to a Mongol origin. But in the Cro-Magnon cavern, and in other caves more recently explored, the remains of a race of men have been brought to light markedly dolichocephalic, and no less striking in cranial capacity. Dr. Broca speaks of these ancient cave-dwellers of the valley of the Vézère as characterised by “sure signs of a powerful cerebral organisation. The skulls are large. Their diameters, their curves, their capacity, attain, and even surpass, our medium skulls of the present day. The forehead is wide, by no means receding, but describing a fine curve. The amplitude of the frontal tuberosities denotes a large development of the anterior cerebral lobes, which are the seat of the most noble intellectual faculties.”
This primitive race of hunters, marked by such exceptional characteristics, belonged to the remote Reindeer period of Western Europe, and was contemporary with the mammoth, the tichorine rhinoceros, and the fossil horse, as well as with the cave-lion, the cave-bear, and other long-extinct carnivora of Europe. The remarkable evidence of their intellectual capacity has already been reviewed, in considering the manifestations of the artistic faculty among primitive races. Their weapons and implements, including carved maces or official batons, as they are assumed to be, contribute additional evidence of skill and latent capacity among a primitive race of hunters and cave-dwellers. Dr. Broca, after a consideration of the merits of their ingenious arts, says: “They had advanced to the very threshold of civilisation”; and Dr. Pruner-Bey thus comments on their characteristics: “If we consider that its three individuals had a cranial capacity much superior to the average at the present day; that one of them was a female, and that female crania are generally below the average of male crania in size; and that nevertheless the cranial capacity of the Cro-Magnon woman surpasses the average capacity of male skulls of to-day, we are led to regard the great size of the brain as one of the more remarkable characters of the Cro-Magnon race. This cerebral volume seems to me even to exceed that with which at the present day a stature equal to that of our cave-folks would be associated; whilst the skulls from the Belgium caves are small, not only absolutely, but even relatively in the rather small stature of the inhabitants of those caves.”
The Canstadt head is undoubtedly an unintellectual type suggestive of an inferior, though not necessarily an older savage race; for the evidence of climate, contemporary fauna, and other indices of the environments of the Cro-Magnon cave-dwellers, all point to an early Post-Glacial era. Dr. Isaac Taylor, in his Origin of the Aryans, assuming the priority of the Canstadt man, speaks of him as “this primitive savage, the earliest inhabitant of Europe.” The forehead in this type is low and receding, and the cerebral capacity generally correspondingly inferior. The relative superposition in some discoveries of ancient human remains, as in the alluvium and gravels of a former bed of the Seine, at Grenelle, lends confirmation to the idea that in this poorly-developed cranial type we recover the physical characteristics of the earliest type of the European savage thus far brought to light. But no disclosure of regular sepulture, or of implements or carvings assignable to him, have hitherto furnished the means of determining his condition or mode of life.
The disclosures of the rock-shelters in the valley of the Vézère are, on the contrary, replete with interest, from the evidence they furnish of a race of savage hunters, in whom ingenious skill and great artistic aptitude gave evidence of latent intellectual capacity of a high order. The remarkable size of crania accompanying those examples of primitive art seemingly pertaining to the Troglodytes of the Mammoth and Reindeer periods of Central Europe, is the more significant from its bearing on the evidence of progressive cerebral development adduced by Dr. Broca from skulls recovered from ancient and modern cemeteries of Paris. It appears, indeed, to conflict with any theory of a progressive development from the Troglodyte of the Post-Glacial age to the civilised Frenchman of modern times. Professor Boyd Dawkins has accordingly been at some pains in his Cave Hunting to show that the conclusions formed by previous observers as to the epoch of their burial are not supported by the facts of the case; and he sums up his review of the whole evidence by expressing a conviction that he “should feel inclined to assign the interments to the Neolithic age, in which cave-burial was so common. The facts,” he adds, “do not warrant the human skeletons being taken as proving the physique of the palæolithic hunters of the Dordogne, or as a basis for an inquiry into the ethnology of the palæolithic races. Professor Boyd Dawkins also pronounces the same doubts in reference to the equally characteristic male skeleton found in a cave at Mentone, and to others obtained in the Lombrive and other caves. It is not to be overlooked that the possibility of the intrusion of human remains into earlier strata constitutes an important element suggesting caution in reasoning from such evidence. For the remains of man differ from those of other animals found in such series of deposits as mark a succession of periods, in so far as they pertain to the only animal habitually given to the practice of interment. Human skeletons found under such circumstances may have been artificially intruded long subsequent to the accumulation of the breccia in which they lay. Happily, however, any doubts as to the contemporaneity of the human remains with the other cave relics has been removed by the discovery of skeletons, similar in type, in other caverns in the same valley—and especially in that of Laugerie Basse,—in positions which seem to leave no room for questioning their being of the same age as the works of art found along with them.
Other examples of the ancient man of Europe show him in like manner endowed with a cerebral development in advance of the rudest races of modern times. The skull found by Dr. Schmerling in the Engis cave, near Liège, along with remains of six or seven human skeletons, was embedded in the same matrix with bones of the fossil elephant, rhinoceros, hyæna, and other extinct quadrupeds. It is a fairly proportioned, well-developed dolichocephalic skull; and, like others of the ancient human skulls of different types thus far found, has signally disappointed the expectations of those who count upon invariably finding a lower type the older the formation in which it occurs. “Assuredly,” says Professor Huxley, “there is no mark of degradation about any part of its structure. It is, in fact, a fair average human skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brain of a savage.” Even the famous Neanderthal skull, of uncertain geological antiquity, but pronounced to be “the most brutal of all human skulls,” acquires its exceptional character, as already noted, chiefly from the abnormal development of the superciliary region.
It is a universally accepted fact that the size of the male head and the weight of the brain are greater than those of the female. The average weight of the male brain is found to exceed that of the female by about 10 per cent; or, as it is stated by Professor Welcker, the brain-weight of man is to that of woman as 100 to 90. But the difference of stature between the two sexes has to be taken into account. The average, based on various series of observations to determine the mean stature for man and for woman, shows the latter to be about 8 per cent less than the former; or, as Dr. Thurnam has stated it more precisely:
RATIO OF STATURE AND BRAIN-WEIGHT IN THE TWO SEXES
| Male. | Female. | |
| Stature | 100 | 92.0 |
| Weight of brain | 100 | 90.3 |
Here again, however, it becomes important to take into consideration other elements of difference besides weight; for, as Tennyson insists, “Woman is not undevelopt man, but diverse.” The results of Wagner’s observations on the superficial measurements of the convolutions of the brain point to the conclusion that in the female the lesser brain-weight may be compensated by a larger superficies. Ranked in the order of their relative weights in grammes, six average brains of men and women were found to stand thus:—
| 1. | Male | (a) | 1340 |
| 2. | Male | (b) | 1330 |
| 3. | Male | (c) | 1273 |
| 4. | Female | (d) | 1254 |
| 5. | Female | (e) | 1223 |
| 6. | Female | (f) | 1185 |
But the same brains, when tested by the degrees of convolution of the frontal lobe, measured in squares of sixteen square millimetres, irrespective of the question of relative size, ranked as follows, advancing the female (d) from the fourth to the first place, and reducing the male (c) from the third to the sixth place:—
| 1. | Female | (d) | 2498 |
| 2. | Male | (a) | 2451 |
| 3. | Male | (b) | 2309 |
| 4. | Female | (f) | 2300 |
| 5. | Female | (e) | 2272 |
| 6. | Male | (c) | 2117 |
But, as already indicated, some modern disclosures tend to raise the question whether the difference between the sexes, in so far as relative volume of brain is concerned, has not been increased as a result of civilisation. The disparity in size between the Cro-Magnon male and female skeletons is quite as great as that of modern times, but the capacity of the female skull is relatively good.
Other observations, such as those of Professor Rolleston “On the People of the Long Barrow Period,” seem to indicate a nearer approximation in actual cranial capacity of the two sexes in prehistoric times than among modern civilised races. On the assumption that intellectual activity tends to permanent development of brain, it is consistent with the conditions of savage life that it should bring the mental energies of both sexes into nearly equal play. They have equally to encounter the struggle for existence, and have their faculties stimulated in a corresponding degree. As nations rise above the purely savage condition of the hunter stage, this relative co-operation of the sexes is subjected to great variations. The laws of Solon with reference to the right of sale of a daughter or sister, and the penalties for the violation of a free woman, show the position of the weaker sex among the Greeks at that early stage to have been a degrading one. But the change was great at a later stage; and much of our higher civilisation is traceable to the early establishment of the European woman’s rights, which Christianity subsequently tended to enlarge. The position of woman among the ancient Britons appears to have been one of perfect equality with man. Among the Arabians and other Mohammedan nations, including the modern Turks, the opposite is the case; and the whole tendency of the creed of the Koran, and the social life among Mohammedan nations, must be towards the intellectual atrophy of woman. Hence it is consistent with the diverse conditions of life that, in so far as cerebral development is the result of mental activity, a much closer approximation is to be looked for in the mass and weight of brain in the two sexes among savage races, than among nations where woman systematically occupies a condition of servile degradation, or of passive inertness.
Some interesting results of the actual brain-weights of Negroes and other typical representatives of inferior savage races have been published, including examples of both sexes; and although the observations are as yet too few for the deduction of any absolute or very comprehensive conclusions, they furnish a valuable contribution towards this department of ethnical comparison. In 1865, Dr. Peacock published the results of observations on the brains of four Negroes and two Negresses; and to those he subsequently added a seventh example.[[164]] Others are included in the following table. But I have excluded some extremes of variation, such as the two given by Mascagni, one of which weighed 1458 grammes, or 51.5 oz. av., and the other only 738 grammes, or 26.1 oz. av. In addition to such actual brain-weights, Morton, Tiedemann, Davis, Wyman, and others, have gauged the skulls of Negroes, American Indians, Mincopies, Tasmanians, Australians, and other savage races, as well as those of many civilised and semi-civilised nations, and thereby contributed valuable data towards determining their relative cranial capacity. In his Crania Ægyptiaca, Dr. Morton, when discussing the traces of a Negro element in the ancient Egyptian population, says: “I have in my possession seventy-nine crania of Negroes born in Africa, for which I am indebted to Drs. Goheen and M’Dowell, lately attached to the medical department of the colony of Liberia, in Western Africa; and especially to Don Jose Rodriguez Cisneros, M.D., of Havana, in the island of Cuba. Of the whole number, fifty-eight are adult, or sixteen years of age and upwards, and give eighty-five cubic inches for the average size of the brain. The largest head measures ninety-nine cubic inches; the smallest but sixty-five. The latter, which is that of a middle-aged woman, is the smallest adult head that has hitherto come under my notice.”[[165]]