SAVAGE AND CIVILIZED NATIONS.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1543, 29 January 1879, Page 3

SAVAGE AND CIVILIZED NATIONS.

At a recent meeting of the Anthropological Institute, a paper by Professor Daniel Wilson, of Toronto, was read on " Some American Illustrations of tho Evolution of New Varieties of Men," in which the author controverted the prevalent opinion that the contact with more civilised races is necessarily fatal to savage tribes, and brought forward many facts in support of his position. He owned, however, that it is only by the gradual adoption of the usages of civilisation, and by amalgamation with more progressive peoples, that inferior varieties of mankind can escape the extinction to which they 9eom doomed. Of this process of blending between the two, and the consequent evolution of new varieties of men, he adduced numerous instances. In concluding his paper, Professor Wilson cited the following curious and striking testimony, in proof of the fact that traces of mixed Indian blood are especially common in the province of Quebec:—"l do not think that people generally realise tho great extent to which there is an infusion of Indian blood in the French Canadian population. In the neighbourhood of Quebec, in the Ottawa valley, and to a great extent about Montreal, I hardly think among the original Bottlers there is a family in the lower ranks, and not. many in the higher, who have not some traces of Indian blood. At Ottawa, where we have a large French population, I hardly meet a man—and the women show tho tracts even more readily—where I should not say, from tho personal appearance, that there ia a dash of the red man." Professor Wilson added that in the nesv prov'nee of Manitoba the original population is a half breed one; and it has begun its political existence with a population numbering from 10,000 to 12,000 ; a race of civilised hunters and farmer'?, the offspring of red and white parentage. This is in addition to the much larger number of children of mixed blood, who, following the fortunes of their Indian mothers, grow up members of the nomad hunter tribes. There, more than elsewhere, he sees an analugy to that which may be assumed to have produced the MeLanoch'roi of Europe's pre-historic ages, when the intruding Aryan first came into contact with Turanian or Allopayliun tribes of that Neolithic period when the arts of the metallurgist were there already —as they are now in the unsettled territories of the New World —beginning to supersede the ingenious processes of a purely stone and bone, or of a native copper period.