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Peru, and Brasil. They have the same swarthy and copper colour, flat and smooth hair, small beard, squat body, long eye, with the corner directed upwards towards the temples, prominent cheek bones, thick lips, and an expression of gentleness in the mouth, strongly contrasted with a gloomy and severe look. The American race, after the hyperborean race, is the least numerous; but it occupies the greatest space on the globe. Over a million and a half of square leagues, from the Terra del Fuego islands to the river St. Laurence and Baring's straits, we are struck at the first glance with the general resemblance in the features of the inhabitants. We think we perceive that they all descend from the same stock, notwithstanding the enormous diversity of language which separates them from one another. However, when we reflect more seriously on this family likeness, after living longer among the indigenous Americans, we discover that celebrated travellers, who could only observe a few individuals on the coasts, have singularly exaggerated the analogy of form among the Americans.

Intellectual cultivation is what contributes the most to diversify the features. In barbarous nations there is rather a physiognomy peculiar to the tribe or horde than to any individual. When we compare our domestic animals with those which inhabit our forests we make the same observation. But an European, when he decides on the great re

semblance among the copper-coloured races, is subject to a particular illusion. He is struck with a complexion so different from our own, and the uniformity of this complexion conceals for a long time from him the diversity of individual features. The new colonist can hardly at first distinguish the indigenous, because his eyes are less, fixed on the gentle melancholic or ferocious expression of the countenance than on the red coppery colour and dark luminous and coarse and glossy hair, so glossy indeed that we should believe it to be in a constant state of humectation.

In the faithful portrait which an excellent observer, M. Volney, has drawn of the Canada Indians, we undoubtedly recognize the tribes scattered in the meadows of the Rio Apure and the Carony. The same stile of feature exists no doubt in both Americas; but those Europeans who have sailed on the great rivers Orinoco and Amazons, and have had occasion to see a great number of tribes assembled under the monastical hierarchy in the missions, must have observed that the American race contains nations whose features differ as essentially from one another, as the numerous varieties of the race of Caucasus, the Circassians, Moors, and Persians differ from one another. The tall form of the Patagonians, who inhabit the southern extremity of the new continent, is again found by us, as it were, among the Caribs who dwell in the plains from the Delta of the Orinoco

to the sources of the Rio Blanco.

What a differ

ence between the figure, physiognomy, and physical constitution of these Caribs *, who ought to be accounted one of the most robust nations on the face of the earth, and are not to be confounded with the degenerate Zambos, formerly called Caribs in the island St. Vincent, and the squat bodies of the Chayma Indians of the province of Cumana! What a difference of form between the Indians of Tlascala and the Lipans and Chichimecs of the northern part of Mexico!

The Indians of New Spain have a more swarthy complexion than the inhabitants of the warmest climates of South America. This fact is so much the more remarkable, as in the race of Caucasus, which may be also called the European Arab race, the people of the south have not so fair a skin as those of the north. Though many of the Asiatic nations who inundated Europe in the sixth century had a very dark complexion, it appears, however, that the shades of colour obse vable among the white race are less owing to their origin or mixture than to the local influence of the climate his influence appears to have almost no effect on the e

*The great nation of the Caribs, or Caraibs, who, after having exterminated the Cabres, conquered a considerable part of South America, extended in the i th century from the equa tor to the Virgin Islands. The few families who existed in our times in the Caribbee Islands, recently transported by the English, were a mixture of true Caribs and negros.

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ricans and negros. These races, in which there is an abundant deposition of carburetted hydrogen in the corpus mucosum or reticulatum of Malpighi, resist in a singular manner the impressions of the ambient air. The negros of the mountains of Upper Guinea are not less black than those who live on the coast. There are, no doubt, tribes of a colour by no means deep among the Indians of the new continent, whose complexion approaches to that of the Arabs or Moors. We found the people of the Rio Negro swarthier than those of the Lower Orinoco, and yet the banks of the first of these rivers enjoy a much cooler climate than the more northern regions. In the forests of Guiana, especially near the sources of the Orinoco, are several tribes of a whitish complexion, the Guaicas, Guajaribs, and Arigues, of whom several robust individuals, exhibiting no symptom of the asthenical malady which characterises albinos, have the appearance of true Mestizoes. Yet these tribes have never mingled with Europeans, and are surrounded with other tribes of a dark brown hue. The Indians in the torrid zone who inhabit the most elevated plains of the Cordillera of the Andes, and those who under the 45° of south latitude live by fishing among the islands of the archipelago of Chonos, have as coppery a complexion as those who under a burning climate cultivate bananas in the narrowest and deepest vallies of the equinoxial region. We must add, that the Indians of the

mountains are clothed, and were so long before the conquest, while the aborigines who wander over the plains go quite naked, and are consequently always exposed to the perpendicular rays of the sun. I could never observe that in the same individual those parts of the body which were covered were less dark than those in contact with a warm and humid air. We every where perceive that the colour of the American depends very little on the local position in which we see him. The Mexicans, as we have already observed, are more swarthy than the Indians of Quito and New Grenada, who inhabit a climate completely analogous; and we even see that the tribes dispersed to the north of the Rio Gila are less brown than those in the neighbourhood of the kingdom of Guatimala. This deep colour continues to the coast nearest to Asia. But under the 54° 10' of north latitude, at Cloak-bay, in the midst of copper-coloured Indians with small long eyes, there is a tribe with large eyes, European features, and a skin less dark than that of our peasantry. All these facts tend to prove that notwithstanding the variety of climates and elevations inhabited by the different races of men, nature never deviates from the model of which she made selection thousands of years

ago.

My observations on the innate colour of the aborigenes differ in part from the assertions of Michikinakoua, the celebrated chief of the Miamis,

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