The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1&2). George Warburton
297–303; Venegas's California, Part ii., §ii.
"From the happy coincidence of various circumstances, man raises himself to a certain degree of cultivation, even in climates the least favorable to the development of organized beings. Near the polar circle, in Iceland, in the twelfth century, we know the Scandinavians cultivated literature and the arts with more success than the inhabitants of Denmark and Prussia."—Humboldt.
[230] The most temperate climate lies between the 40th and 50th degree of latitude, and it produces the most handsome and beautiful people. It is from this climate that the ideas of the genuine color of mankind and of the various degrees of beauty ought to be derived. The two extremes are equally remote from truth and from beauty. The civilized countries situated under this zone are Georgia, Circassia, the Ukraine, Turkey in Europe, Hungary, the south of Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, and the northern parts of Spain. The natives of these territories are the most handsome and most beautiful people in the world.—Buffon, English trans., vol. iii., p. 205.
[231] Mr. Flint says. "I have inspected the northern, middle, and southern Indians for a length of ten years; my opportunities of observation have, therefore, been considerable, and I do not undertake to form a judgment of their character without, at least, having seen much of it. I have been forcibly struck by a general resemblance in their countenance, make, conformation, manners, and habits. I believe that no race of men can show people who speak different languages, inhabit different climes, and subsist on different food, and who are yet so wonderfully alike."—(1831.)
Don Antonio Ulloa, who had extensive opportunities of forming an opinion on the natives of both the continents of America, asserts that "If we have seen one American, we may be said to have seen all, their color and make are so nearly the same."—Notic. Americanas, p. 308. See, likewise, Garcia, Origin de los Indios, p. 55–242; Torquemada, Monarch. Indiana, vol. ii., p. 571.
"If we except the northern regions, where we find men similar to the Laplanders, all the rest of America is peopled with inhabitants among whom there is little or no diversity. This great uniformity among the natives of America seems to proceed from their living all in the same manner. All the Americans were, or still are, savages; the Mexicans and Peruvians were so recently polished that they ought not to be regarded as an exception. Whatever, therefore, was the origin of those savages, it seems to have been common to the whole. All the Americans have sprung from the same source, and have preserved, with little variation, the characters of their race; for they have all continued in a savage state, and have followed nearly the same mode of life. Their climates are not so unequal with regard to heat and cold as those of the ancient continent, and their establishment in America has been too recent to allow those causes which produce varieties sufficient time to operate so as to render their effects conspicuous."—Buffon, Eng. trans., vol. iii., p. 188.
[232] See Appendix, No. XLVIII (vol. II.)
[233] See Appendix, No. XLIX. (vol. II.)
[234] There would never have been any difference of opinion between physiologists, as to the existence of the beard among the Americans, if they had paid attention to what the first historians of the conquest of their country have said on this subject; for example, Pigafetta, in 1519, in his Journal preserved in the Ambrosian library at Milan, and published (in 1800) by Amoretti, p. 18.—Benzoni, Hist. del Mundo Nuovo, p. 35, 1572; Bembo, Hist. Venet., p. 86, 1557; Humboldt's Personal Narrative, vol. iii., p. 235.
"The Indians have no beard, because they use certain receipts to extirpate it, which they will not communicate."—Oldmixon, vol. i., p. 286.
"Experience has made known that these receipts were little shells which they used as tweezers; since they have become acquainted with metals, they have invented an instrument consisting of a piece of brass wire rolled round a piece of wood the size of the finger, so as to form a special spring; this grasps the hairs within its turns, and pulls out several at once. No wonder if this practice, continued for several generations, should enfeeble the roots of the beard. Did the practice of eradicating the beard, originate from the design of depriving the enemy of such a dangerous hold on the face? This seems to me probable."—Volney, p. 412.
[235] When the statue of Apollo Belvedere was shown to Benjamin West on his first arrival at Rome, he exclaimed, "It is a model from a young North American Indian."—Ancient America.
[236] "It is a notorious fact, that every European who has embraced the savage life has become stronger and better inured to every excess than the savages themselves. The superiority of the people of Virginia and Kentucky over them has been confirmed, not only in troop opposed to troop, but man to man, in all their wars."—Volney, p. 417.
[237] Yet infanticide is condemned among the Red Indians both by their theology and their feelings. Dr. Richardson relates that those tribes who hold the idea that "the souls of the departed have to scramble up a great mountain, at whose top they receive the reward of their good or bad deeds, declare that women who have been guilty of infanticide never reach the top of this mountain at all. They are compelled instead to travel around the scenes of their crimes with branches of trees tied to their legs. The melancholy sounds which are heard in the still summer evenings, and which the ignorance of the white people looks upon as the screams of the goat-suckers, are really, according to my informant, the moanings of these unhappy beings"—Franklin's Journey to the Polar Seas, p. 77, 78.
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