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.