the beaver-land were sterner than the soft airs of Tasmania. The cultivation of the ground and the tending of cattle were despised by both peoples. The settlers believed both of them incapable of labour, and unqualified for improvement. And yet nations of refinement have arisen in the depths of the forest, and left vast memorials of intellectual greatness. The conformation of mummy skulls in Peru, and the crania of ancient Mexico, alike indicate the identity of the past with the present Indians. How then did these barbarians of so low a physical type become raised to such a social eminence?
It is said in their legends that white and bearded men from the mountain lake Titicaca, and the pale-faced Quetzalcoatl from the plateau of Central America, brought the general blessings of civilization to the Red man. The savages were humanized by a few strangers of a superior order and benevolent character, and not by the inroad of an extensive emigration, like that of the English in Australia. Numbers, unless governed by good motives, rather repel than attract the barbarian.
Something has been done in more modern days to raise the rude Indian. Some Christian boys in white surplices, led by a venerable monk, walked quietly through an Indian encampment, sweetly chanting a service of the Church. The entranced warriors and their squaws gazed and listened, till wonder and pleasure brought tears to their eyes, and their knees to the stranger. A marvellous change was wrought by these Jesuits in Paraguay; but the Spanish authorities interfered with the mission, confiscated the property, expatriated the fathers, and gave the lands to greedy colonists. The pueblo is in ruins, the churches are lost in tangled thickets, the fields are a wilderness, and the converts are naked savages of the rocks or pampas again.
We often speak of the Primitive man; where is he? The very despised Tasmanian had advanced in one respect, according to our notions of civilization, beyond the age of Abraham. We read of him marrying his half-sister; a practice which, though recognised as proper with his people, was abhorrent to the customs of Diemenese. The primitive man owned no family, for the children were the mother's only. With the wild race in the South, the father had a place in the community.
The Tasmanians had already advanced. But why had they not done more? Not certainly because of the fright their
