"The seats of ancient civilization, both in Asia and Europe, were confined, through all their earliest historic ages, to the fertile and genial climates and warm latitudes of the south. The north contributed the hardy barbarians to whom, in their degeneracy, they became a spoil and a prey. It is only in very modern times that Transalpine Europe has given birth to a native northern civilization, while in Asia its northern latitudes still remain in the occupation of wandering hordes descended from the spoilers who ravaged the elder empires of Asia, and shared with the barbarians of Europe in the dismemberment of decaying Rome. It is not from a mere accidental coincidence that we are able to recover traces of a nearly similar succession of events in the New World. Civilization took root for a time in the Mississippi Valley, whether selforiginated, or as an offshoot from the more favored scenes of its mature development; but the great plateaus of Mexico and Peru were like well-provisioned and garrisoned palaces and strongholds, where the spontaneous fertility of tropical climates relieved the wanderers who settled there from the all-absorbing struggle nature for life; and the physical character of the country protected them alike from the temptations to wander, and the instability of settled communities in a nomad country. Yet they could not escape the vicissitudes which have befallen every nation, whose wealth and luxury have so far surpassed the acquisitions of its neighbors as to tempt the cupidity of the barbarian spoiler; and the beautiful valleys of Mexico, the ancient Anahuac, appear to have experienced successive revolutions akin to those which render the ethnology of Italy's equally smiling soil and delightful climate so complicated and difficult. There are vague traditions of Olmecs, Miztecas, and Zapotecs, all highly-civilized precursors of the which elsewhere constitutes the battle with ancient Toltecs, whose entry on the plateau has been dated by most authorities about A.D. 600, and whose independent rule is supposed to have endured for nearly four and a half centuries. Then came the migration from the mythic Aztalan of the north, and the founding of the Aztec monarchy. The details of such traditions, with their dates and whole chronology, are valueless. But the general fact of the successive intrusion of conquering nations, and the consequent admixture of tribes and races, can not be doubted. The civilized countries beyond the southern isthmus may have contributed some of them, and the dispersed mound-builders of Ohio may have been the intruders of other centuries; while the regions immediately surrounding the high valleys more frequently furnished the invading spoil at different times been tempted to trace associations between the ancient mound-builders of the Ohio, the elder civilized race of Mexico, and the Peruvians whoes peculiar remains are recovered from the tombs around Lake Titicaca. That the predominant Mexican race, at the era of the conquest, belonged to one of the great stocks of the Red Indian tribes of the northern continent, appears to be demonstrable by various lines of independent proof." Of these old civilized or semi-civilized nations-Peruvians, Toltecs, Aztecs, and mound-builders-none now remain as distinct elements of the American population. The barbarous Red Indian stock, of which the Aztecs were an offshoot, alone exist in their original condition. And, year by year, they too are passing from the scene. It has been reckoned, or supposed, that the native population of North America in the time of Columbus amounted to about sixteen millions; but the events of the four centuries which have elapsed since then have more than decimated their numbers, which do not now amount to a single million. Their decrease, it is true, has not been all caused by the intruding races of Europe. A deadly pestilence-as if to make room for our earliest colonists-had almost extirpated many of the New-Eng land tribes immediately before the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. And the internecine wars which the Red Indian tribes have ceaselessly waged upon one another, have made still greater ravages in the native population. The powerful Iroquois confederacy especially made frightful havoc its power had declined the cry of "A Moamong their neighbors; and long after hawk!" sufficed to drive the remains of the discomfited and almost extirpated tribes still further into the wilderness. Even the tribes of the terrible confederacy are now only represented by less than three thousand souls, living in scattered settlements, and are likely soon to lose their distinctive existence. They are surrounded, and all but submerged, by the wave of European immigration, which is gradually bringing destruction even upon their fellow-tribes of the far west. Having rolled over the Alleghany Mountains, and descended into the great central basin of the continent, that mighty wave has al ready overpassed the line of the Mississippi, and is advancing breast-high-like the stream-tides of the Solway-over the upland prairies of the far west. Even the we must say, more acceptable view of the case. The Red Men, he says, will indeed disappear, but not wholly by extinction. The diminution of their numbers is being affected, to a considerable extent, by absorption into the race which is supplanting them. This is an entirely new view, and a very important one. Dr. Wilson de shores of the Pacific are now being peopled by the overflowings of Europe-so as to cut off the retreat of the tribes which are receding before the ever advancing array of the pale-faces from the east. A single tribe of Indians require a large area for their existence-vast hunting-fields, where the herds of buffalo may graze at ease in the solitude, and furnish food for the un-monstrates that it is also a true one. We civilized and apparently unreclaimable Red Men. Already the best part of the prairies has been occupied by the intruding white race; and the Red Men and the herds of buffalo are being pushed westward upon the comparatively arid uplands which adjoin the base of the Rocky Mountains; and ere long there will be no more vast areas of grassy prairie for the haunts of the buffalo, and the existence of the Red Men must cease with that of the herds which supply their food. do not know whether it first occurred to This approaching extinction of the Indian tribes has long been regarded as an inevitable event by every one who has considered the subject. They will not-apparently they can not become civilized. They are pioneering into the wild west, the work has "At every fresh stage of colonization, or of the least pliable of any barbarous race of necessarily been accomplished by the hardy which we have had cognizance; and, more- youths, or the hunters and trappers of the over, they are placed in circumstances the clearing. Rarely indeed did they carry with least favorable for the gradual adoption of them wives or daughters; but where they civilization. They, the wildest and most found a home amid savage-haunted wilds, nomadic race on the globe, are brought they took to themselves wives of the daughters into direct contact with the highest civil- of the soil. To this mingling of blood, in its ization which has arisen among mankind. Indian presented little obstacle. Henry, in least favorable aspects, the prejudices of the No affinities whatever, either of blood or his narrative of travel among the Cristineaux usages, exist between them and the Euro- on Lake Winipegon, in 1760, after describing pean intruders. A Niagara separates the the dress and allurements of the female Cristilevel of the one race from that of the other.neaux, adds: One of the chiefs assured me The Indians can not rise by a leap to the that the children borne by their women to Eucivilization of the white men. It would ropeans were bolder warriors and better huntrequire centuries of gradual contact for recurs in various forms. The patient hardiers than themselves."* This idea frequently them to do so, if at all; whereas the wave hood of the half-breed lumberers and trappers of European settlement presses rapidly is recognized equally in Canada and the Hudupon them, urging them into sullen strife, son's Bay territory, and experience seems to and intensifying their natural antipathy to have suggested the same idea relative to the a race and civilization with which they Esquimaux. Dr. Kane remarks, that the have no points of affinity. They are wast-half-breeds of the coast rival the Esquimaux ing away in ceaseless attacks, bloodily re in their powers of endurance.' But whatever taliated, upon the European settlers; and the fact is unquestionable, that all along the be the characteristic of the Indian half-breed, they are necessarily wasting away also, in widening outskirts of the newer clearings, and proportion as the area of the grassy prai- wherever an outlying trading or hunting-post ries is reduced by the steady advance of is established, we find a fringe of half-breed their white supplanters. Are they to population marking the transitional bordervanish utterly, like the beaver and the wild land, which is passing away from its aborigibuffalo? The answer to this question, nal claimants. I was particularly struck with which has been given by all writers on the subject, has hitherto been an unhesitating affirmative. Dr. Wilson, however, presents us with a new and, *Henry's Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories. 1760-1776; p. 249. 246. Kane's Arctic Explorations, 1853–55, vol. i. p. terms with the whites in the trade and business of the place. In this condition the population of all the frontier settlements exists; and while, as new settlers come in, and the uncivilized Indians retire into the forest, the mixed element disappears, it does so purely by absorption. The traces of Indian maternity are gradually effaced by the numerical preponderance of the European; but, nevertheless, the native element is there, even when the faint traces of its physical manifestations elude all but the observant and well-practiced eye. this during a brief residence at the Sault Ste. | tained by the American government; but Marie, and in the immediate vicinity of one of the personal observations of Mr. Morgan the Hudson's Bay forts, in the summer of 1855. and others show that a partial intermixAt all the white settlements near those ture of the two races is likewise taking of the Indians, the evidence of admixture was abundant, from the pure half-breed to the place in the territories of the United slightly marked remoter descendant of Indian States. The facts thus established by Dr. maternity, discoverable only by the straight Wilson are highly important both from black hair, and a singular watery glaze in the an historical point of view and from their eye, not unlike that of the English gipsy. bearings upon ethnological science. In There they were to be seen, not only as fishers, the Varieties of Mankind, in which the trappers, and lumberers, but engaged on equal doctrine of the unity of mankind is denied, it is maintained by Dr. Nott that opposite races, such as the Red and the White, can not amalgamate, for the offspring of such intermarriages always is feeble and dies out. No such hybrid race, he says, can be permanently established; and the Red Men, in his opinion, were doomed to extinction without leaving a trace of their existence. The facts brought to light by Dr. Wilson entirely refute these opinions. They moreover, by a reasonable inference, throw important light on the manner in which comminglings of races have taken place in past times. When the curtain rises upon the historical times of mankind, we find that every nation has already changed, or is in process of changing, its seats; and in the course of these universal and ceaseless migrations, nation has come into contact with nation, each becoming more or less altered alike in blood, language, and civilization. If the proud and unbending white race of England at the height of its civilization has mingled its blood with that of the Red-skins of the American prairies, we may be very sure that a similar commixture of blood has taken place wherever nation has hurtled against nation in the past. The old races disappear, but they leave traces of their blood to affect the organization, character, and career of the nations which have supplanted them. "Nor are such traces confined to the frontier settlements. I have recognized the semi-Indian features in the gay assemblies at a Canadian governor - general's receptions, in the halls of the legislature, among the undergraduates of Canadian universities, and mingling in the selectest social circles. And this is what has been going on in every new American settlement for upwards of three centuries, under every diversity of circumstance. Two diverse processes are apparent in such intermixture. Where the half-breed children remain with their Indian mother, they grow up in the habits of the aborigines; and, intermingling with the pure-blood Indians, are reabsorbed into the native stock, where the tribe survives. But when, on the contrary, they win the regard of their white father, the opposite is the case; and this occurs more frequently with the Spanish and French than with British colonists. In Lower Canada, half-breeds, and men and women of partial Indian blood, are constantly met with in all ranks of life; and the traces of Indian blood may be detected in the hair, the eye, the high cheek-bone, and the peculiar mouth, as well as in certain traits of Indian character, where the physical indications are too slight to be discerned by a casual observer." Remarkable as are many of the phenomena presented to us in the New World, the most remarkable, as it seems to us, is the extraordinary commingling of diverse races. which is being accomplished on its soil. Nowhere is this remarkable process of Navigation has now so bridged the ocean, intermixture and absorption seen on so that from every country in Europe setgreat a scale as at the Red river settle- tlers have reached the American shores; ment, where there is a settled population and railways have so facilitated locomoof mixed blood amounting to about seven tion by land, and so quickened the movethousand two hundred souls, who inter- ments of social life, that these diverse marry freely with the white population, peoples from Europe are shaken together and share with perfect equality in all the and amalgated in the New World till the rights and privileges of the community. original distinctions disappear, and a new No similar statistics have yet been ob-national type is formed. Moreover, as we have seen, these White Americans are blending to some extent with the native Red stock of the continent. Within a century from the present time we may expect to see the separate existence of the Red Man and his hunting-grounds swept away, and an ethnographically composite yet socially homogeneous population existing all over North America. The intermingled white blood of Europe will here and there be tinged with the native red blood of America. Nor does the strange commixture of population stop here. Not only Europe and America, but Africa, and in a lesser degree Asia, will be represented in the new race which is growing up in the New World. The Chinese settlers in California are the vanguard of a more numerous emigration which will ere long take place from the crowded fields of China to the American shores of the Pacific. And it must not be forgotten that among the contingencies, we might say certainties, of the future, is to be reckoned a rupture of the constitution of society in the American States, which will destroy the impassable barrier which at present separates every one tinged with African blood from social union with the rest of the population. It is the institution of slavery, with its accompanying brand of inferiority, which makes the line of separation to be at present so sharply drawn. But slavery in its present form is doomed to extinction, and the milder form of predial service, which it will ere long assume, will pave the way for greater changes; and the four millions of people with African blood in their veins will ultimately add one element more to the composite population which already exists in a state of legal and social equality on the North American continent. From the London Intellectual Observer. QUETELET Ο Ν SHOOTING-STARS. M. QUETELET devotes a chapter of his Physique du Globe to "Shooting Stars," and the following passages contain the most interesting information in a condensed form. He tells us that the first efforts to observe these bodies in a scien-"inconvenient neighbor." tific way were made by two students at Göttingen, Brandes, and Benzenberg, who began their labors in 1798, and published their first researches at Hamburg in 1800. Olbers and Chladni encouraged these young men, but attention might not have been generally excited to the subject if Humboldt and Bonpland had not astonished the world by their account of the splendid shower of falling stars which they observed in America on the 15th of November, 1799. In 1824 Quetelet took up the study of these bodies at Brussels, especially with a view to determine their heights, velocities, and trajectories-subjects on which the two young Germans had previously labored. In 1837 Benzenberg addressed a long letter to Quetelet, describing the investigations in which he had been engaged. He considered, with other authorities, that shooting stars were stones ejected by lunar volcanoes, and cir culating round the world by millions. Having this notion he called the moon an In 1836 M. Quetelet informs us that only five cases existed in which the veloci ties of shooting-stars had been calculated, and in the following year he invited a general concurrence of observers in various countries. The 13th of November was ascertained to be the date of the annual recurrence of the phenomena on a large scale in America, while the 10th of August had been found prolific in Europe. In six cases M. Quetelet computed the velocities of falling-stars, and obtained an average of five leagues, each equal to a twentieth of a degree, per second. Various opinions were given as to the number of these meteors on ordinary nights, and Sir John Herschel thought a single observer might reckon upon seeing sixteen per hour, and would not consider the night extraordinary if he did not see twice as many. The pupils of the observatory in Paris, each looking to one half of the sky, had noticed forty to fifty per hour, but Arago reckoned twelve to fifteen as a mean quantity. In America, Mr. Herrick spoke of fifty or sixty an hour between three and six o'clock A.M., and about twenty-five from six to ten P.M., as being about the total number visible. M. Quetelet remarks: "I will not insist upon the quantity a single observer may see, but there is an important distinction to establish, which is, that the latter part of the night offers double the chance of the beginning. This, if proved, would be a strong argument in considering the probable origin of shooting-stars." During their passage, shooting stars sometimes emit a series of sparks, or leave behind them a luminous train, the duration of which varies. Their color like wise differs, and sometimes changes during the passage of the same meteor. The straight course which they generally appear to take is not invariable, for in some cases a sensible curvature is noticed, and on rare occasions one may be seen to deviate abruptly from its primitive direction. So far back as 1762 Musschenbroek observed in his Treatise on Physics, "that shooting-stars were often seen in spring and autumn," and in another passage he specially indicated their appearance in the month of August. This appears to have been forgotten when Humboldt published his account of the showers of these objects which he witnessed in America. In an article published by Schummacher, in his Year Book, Olbers observed that an immense quantity of planetary corpuscules, forming shooting-stars, appeared to move in orbits round the sun, and traverse the earth's orbit between eighteen and twenty one degrees of Taurus. The orbits of the bodies were approximated and nearly parallel, and they furnished routes for myriads of infinitely small asteroids, whose revolution, he considered, was completed in from three to six years. Moreover, they appeared to be very unequally distributed, being densely accumulated in some portions of the orbit, and thinly scattered in others. M. Quetelet remarks that it "must be observed that the group of shooting-stars of the 11th and 12th of November has been scarcely noticed for ten years," and he asks "whether it has actually disappeared, or whether there is a certain periodicity in its returns." He adds, during the last century the months of August and November were already noted for the frequency of shooting-stars; and that the idea of singling out the 10th of August was suggested not by Musschenbroek, but by his own researches, and it seems that a quantity of these meteors was observed on that day in the years 1800, and in 1801, '6, '9, '11, '13, '15, '18, '19, '20, '22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, '33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, '44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, '55, '56, '57, '58, '59, and '60. After M. Quetelet had pointed to the 10th of August, a manuscript of a work in the last century was shown to him, in which the same date was associated with meteorodes, and Mr. Forster, in his Pocket Encyclopaedia of Natural Phenomena, stated that the Roman Catholics of Ireland had a tradition representing the shooting-stars of this period as the burning tears of St. Lawrence, whose fête was on the very day. Silliman's Journal also cites a Thessalian belief that the heavens opened on the night of the transfiguration, 6th of August, and permitted the celestial candles to be seen. M. Biot likewise is of opinion that the appearances of shooting-stars in August and November are the same as the phenomena which are made to figure fifteen days later in Chinese catalogues. M. Coulvier-Gravier has put forward the opinion that the meteoric appearances of August tend to grow less every year; but the records of observation do not indicate any law of decrease, and in some years, such as 1843, '46, and '51, the weather was extremely unfavorable at that date. In addition to the November and August periods, M. Quetelet finds the nights of the middle of October, and those of the 7th of December and 2d of January, prolific in shooting-stars. M. Quetelet gives an elaborate table of the chief appearances of shooting-stars, from the earliest records down to 1860, and it is not surprising to find that superstition had often connected their movements with "wrath to man." In 1726 one of the most brilliant star-showers appeared in Europe, and at eight o'clock in the evening of the 19th of October, an observer at Liege states that for two hours the sky was inflamed by these meteors, so |