Paleface

“ We were few when the paleface people came—scattered and few and afraid.
Fewer were they, but they brought the law, and the dark-skin men obeyed.
The paleface people drew a line that none by dark or day
Might cross with fell intent to hunt—capture or drive or slay. ”

“ Paleface, dweller in wigwams of brick and stone, it is made known to us that your heart turns from the settlements to the heart of the great forest, and that you desire to become a child of the Lenape, whose totem is the tortoise, to be adopted by the Delawares, the tribe of Uncas and Chingachgook; that you long to follow the trail of the red deer and to spread your blanket beside the sweet waters ”

“ The paleface must show himself a very good friend indeed before he is allowed to hear the stories told to native guests or to the children. The white friend may be a hunter, and then his Indian guide will tell in his own way stories connected with objects seen by them in the forest, on the plain, or on the mountain. [80]
Henry R. Schoolcraft, an American geologist, was much among the red men, from eastern New York to the source of the Mississippi, which he discovered. ”

“ He was within a few feet of their trail. Had he discovered it? It was a critical moment for the two palefaces. A single movement, however slight, would betray them. It was dangerous to breathe even, or to stir an inch, for the crackling of a twig would have been fatal. Their very lives hung on a slender thread. ”

“ She slowly raised her head on feeling the touch, and, fixing on her questioner a gloomy glance, in which it was easy to perceive a slight wildness, she replied in English, in a hollow voice, and with guttural accent—
"The Palefaces are mad; they ever think themselves in their towns; they forget that in the prairie the trees have ears and the leaves eyes to see and hear all that is done. The Blackfeet Indians raise their hair very skilfully." ”

“ The rich and varied fauna which inhabited Europe at the dawn of the tertiary period,—as shown by the abundant remains of mammalia wherever suitable deposits of Eocene age have been discovered,—proves, that an extensive Palæarctic continent then existed; and the character of the flora and fauna of the Eocene deposits is so completely tropical, that we may be sure there was then no barrier of climate between it and the Oriental region. ”

“ Unfortunately, our knowledge of the interesting fossil fauna of this continent, is almost wholly confined to the Post-Pliocene and Pliocene periods. A few remains have been discovered in deposits believed to be of Eocene age, but nothing whatever representing the vast intervening period, so rich in peculiar forms of animal life both in North America and Europe. ”

“ That the Alpine type approaches all the other human millions on the Asiatic continent, in the head form especially, but in hair color and stature as well, also prejudices us in the matter, just as the increasing long-headedness and extreme brunetteness of our Mediterranean race led us previously to derive it from some type parent to that of the African negro. ”

“ Another curious fact concerning the Paleocene mammalian faunas is that they were made up entirely of small and very small animals; not a single mammal as large as a sheep has yet been found in these beds, and the same is true of Europe.
That a land-connection with the Old World existed during the Paleocene epoch, is indicated by the similarity of the faunas of North America and Europe. ”

“ For no analogous traces of contemporary modelling in clay furnish material for comparison with the art of the Palæolithic era; though the skill of its bone and ivory carvers was in no degree inferior to that of the Mexican or Peruvian modeller. But the æsthetic aptitude of that old race of Europe’s intellectual dawn is in some respects unique. In so far as their ingenious arts furnish any evidence of true racial characteristics, the men of the Neolithic era inherited none of their æsthetic feelings ”

“ On the other hand, people whose ancestors dwelt for centuries in the cold, dark, cloudy and foggy climate of Northwestern Europe have less need for pigmentation and are, therefore, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed and white-skinned. ”

“ In the hearths or kitchen-middens and in the refuse heaps of the camps we no longer find evidence of the splitting of the jaws of mammals and of the long and short bones of the limbs, or even of the larger foot bones, in search of marrow, which is such a universal feature of the Upper Palæolithic deposits.
The artistic impulse of the north is very crude and naturalistic. ”

“ As the northern hemisphere divided into climatic zones these physical characters were bound to develop. The men who went southward developed, especially when fully exposed to the sun on open plains, the layer of black pigment which marks the negroid type. There is good reason, as we shall see to think that man did not yet wear clothing, though he had a fairly conspicuous, if dwindling, coat of hair. ”

“ The vicissitudes in the history of humanity during its stay on this southern continent have been as strange, varied, and inexplicable as paleontology shows to have been the case, on the same continent, in the history of the higher forms of animal life during the age of mammals. ”

“ The Pale-faces have more beads, and guns, and blankets, and knives, and vermilion than they require; they wish to give some of these things for the skins and furs which the Red-man does not know what to do with. The great chief of the Pale-faces has sent me to say, ‘Why should we fight? ”

“ The general prevalence of the unnatural custom of flattening the skull on the eastern border-land of Europe and among the numerous tribes of the western coast of America, together with its presence in Polynesia as a connecting link, we think justifies us in concluding that it originated among the wild hordes of the northern steppes of Asia, from which centre it spread in lines of 184radiation until it reached the remote localities in which recent research has found it. ”

“ Though members of both the Alpine and Nordic races inhabited the mountain zone, and are found living together in the same villages, they appear not to have intermarried, at any rate to any considerable extent, for at a much later date we find skulls both of the long-headed and the broad-headed types, but few if any which show evidence of mixed ancestry. ”

“ The Patagonians, exposed without shelter or protection to a climate possibly not very dissimilar from that of Europe at the time during which the Neanderthal man lived, are remarkable for the stoutness of their limb bones. ”

“ What the great Creator-worker had originated in the Palæozoic and Secondary periods, had been in after times originated by the little creature-worker, wholly unaware that his contrivance had been anticipated, and was but a repetition of a previously executed design. In the later geologic ages the organization of the various extinct animals so nearly resembled that of the animals which still live, that we may regard it as not inadequately represented by the illustrations of Paley. ”

“ The few human bones discovered in caves, and of undoubted Palæolithic age, seem to me too fragmentary to offer any satisfactory basis for arriving at any ethnological conclusion as to the Palæolithic races of men in Europe. ”

“ Thus it happens that the oldest tribes now inhabiting our country are to be found among the old palæozoic mountains, which, composed of the most ancient of our geological formations, and rising up into the highest grounds, must have been the first parts of the British islands to rise above the waters during the last elevation of the land. ”

“ The fauna of this stage is plainly divisible into two groups: (1) those types which were the descendants of American Paleocene mammals and were therefore indigenous, and (2) the immigrants from other continents. ”

“ The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the redmen has not yet come again. ”

“ Professor Huxley called attention to this subject in a brief address to the London Ethnological Society in 1869. After stating the case, he presented the following queries and suggestions: “The Austro-Columbian fauna, as a whole, therefore, existed antecedently to the glacial epoch. ”

“ A second shape of the head, very different from the last mentioned, belongs principally to the nomadic races, who wander with their herds and flocks over vast plains, and to the tribes who creep along the shores of the Icy Sea, and live partly by fishing, and in part on the flesh of their reindeers. These nations have broad and lozenge-formed faces, and what I have termed pyramidal skulls. ”

“ The study of the skulls and bones undertaken by modern anthropologists, while demonstrating the diversity of races in the archipelago, still confirms the first hypothesis regarding the eastern origin of a large number of the inhabitants. ”

“ The white man's blood and bones have begotten this bronze race, and bequeathed to it in some degree qualities, tendencies, capabilities, such as are the inheritance of the highest order of human animals. ”

“ Long after this wonderful event in the Earth's history, when the human species was spread over a good deal of Asia, Europe, and Africa, migration to the American continents began in attempts to find new feeding grounds and unoccupied areas for hunting and fishing. ”

“ From a zoological point of view Africa north of the Sahara is now and has been since early Tertiary times a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man. The Berbers of north Africa to-day are racially identical with the Spaniards and south Italians while the ancient Egyptians and their modern descendants, the fellaheen, are merely well-marked varieties of this Mediterranean race. ”

“ Variation and natural selection would also afford a key to a multitude of geological facts otherwise wholly unaccounted for, as, for example, why there is generally an intimate connection between the living animals and plants of each great division of the globe and the extinct fauna and flora of the post-tertiary or tertiary formations of the same region; ”

“ As a matter of fact, an ordinary desert supports a much greater variety of plants than does either a forest or a prairie. ”

“ The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin, a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth, are found all over the island. ”

“ The nearest approach I have ever seen to the symmetry of ancient sculpture was among the Arab tribes of Ethiopia. Our Saxon race can supply the athlete, but not the Apollo. ”

“ We see many fine sunsets here, unique in the splendour of their colour. No doubt the surroundings in this fairyland of blue and white do much to increase their beauty. ”

“ This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge. It sees a race pass away, but it passes not away. It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature. ”

“ The kitchen-clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnaean classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe. ”

“ Although mountains may guide migrations, the plains are the regions where people dwell in greatest numbers. ”

“ Looking off to the east and south, the eye caught a glimpse of distant mountain peaks, standing out white and clear against the blue horizon, like a snowy conical cloud, and the intervening stretch of country was broken by hills, ravines, gorges, wood, stream, rocks and prairie, in an interminable jungle, making a country that was the chosen roaming-ground of the fiercest wild animals, the most valuable game, and the wild Indian, and the equally wild hunter and trapper. ”

“ We gaze at the pale grey lustrous sea a moment, We rub the darkness from our eyes, And face our thousand devious secret mornings . . . And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending, Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamer Compassionate over our towers bending. ”

“ We know that there are many animals on this continent not found in the Old World. These must have been carried from here to the ark, and then brought back afterwards. Were the peccary, armadillo, ant-eater, sloth, agouti, vampire-bat, marmoset, howling and prehensile-tailed monkey, the raccoon and muskrat carried by the angels from America to Asia? How did they get there? Did the polar bear leave his field of ice and journey toward the tropics? How did he know where the ark was? Did the kangaroo swim or jump from Australia to Asia? ”

“ Thus the races, though alike in their physical response to climate, may possibly be different in their mental response because they have approached America by different paths. ”

“ Nevertheless most of the evergreen forests of the north must always remain the home of wild animals and trappers, a backward region in which it is easy for a great fur company to maintain a practical monopoly. ”

“ "Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under fantastic headdresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque repose. ”

“ The first and most natural way of lighting the houses of the American colonists, both in the North and South, was by the pine-knots of the fat pitch-pine, which, of course, were found everywhere in the greatest plenty in the forests. ”

“ Few are the foreheads which like Shakespeare’s or Melancthon’s rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer. ”

“ They did not, however, infect the air as the Sudânese sun dried them up like mummies; all had the hue of gray parchment, and were so much alike that the bodies of the Europeans, Egyptians, and negroes could not be distinguished from each other. ”