It would seem that the White man is not really
exterminating the Red man in North America, and that the long-standing idea of the disappearance of the Indian before the advance of the Anglo- Saxon is not based upon actual facts. Colonel Mallery, of the United States Survey, has published a paper on the subject, and gives an opinion which may be summed up by saying that the number of the North-American Indians, if not larger now than in the days of Columbus, at all events does not seem to have decreased. There were, he holds, about half a million when America was discovered, as there are half a million now, the first settlers having exaggerated both the numbers of the tribes and the range of their wanderings. "War, disease, and whisky" have done their worst, but extermination seems as far off as ever ; only the natural increment of the population has been kept down. The English mind seems to have been too hurriedly led, by the contemplation of what has happened in Australia and Tasmania, to the conclusion that the dark man begins to die out when the white man enters his land. That the American Indian will disappear is certain, but the effect will be, as Colonel Mallery holds, the re- sult of absorption, not of extinction. Already, it seems, through the whole extent of our Canadian dominion there is an admixture of Indian blood with white, and the Indians in Canada are rapidly adopting a settled and agricultural, in preference to a nomadic, life. The result of the absorption when complete will be interest- ing to the anthropologist, as it will afford a product of the union of a highly-civilised race with one which has not passed out of the hunting stage of barbarism. Admixtures of race are usually as gradual in their contrasts as in the time they require for their completion.
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