Part 35

But a greater interest attaches to that other class of half-breeds already alluded to, which the new order of things has inevitably tended to efface, though not necessarily to eradicate, as an element in the population of the future province. Besides the civilised race of half-breeds, mingling on a perfect equality with the Whites; brought up in many cases in full enjoyment of such domestic training as the Hudson Bay factor and hunter could furnish in the wilderness; there remained apart from them a half-breed race, the offspring born to native women as the inevitable results of such a social condition as pertains to the occupants of the forts and trading-posts of that remote region. These half-breed buffalo hunters were wholly distinct from the civilised settlers, and yet more nearly related to them than to the wild Indian tribes. They belonged to the settlement, possessed land, and cultivated farms, though their agricultural labours were very much subordinated to the claims of the chase, and they scarcely aimed at more than supplying their own wants. The two bands numbered in all between 6000 and 7000. Each division had its separate tribal organisation and distinct hunting-grounds, extending beyond the British American frontier. In 1849 the White Horse plain half-breeds on the Strayenne river, Dakota territory, rendered the following returns to an officer appointed to take the census: “700 half-breeds, 200 Indians, 603 carts, 600 horses, 200 oxen, 400 dogs, and 1 cat.” This may illustrate the general character of a people partaking of the nomad habits of the Indian, and yet possessed of a considerable amount of movable property and real estate. They are a hardy race, fearless horsemen, and capable of enduring the greatest privations. They have adopted the Roman Catholic faith, and specially coveted the presence of a priest with them when on their hunting expeditions. The mass was celebrated on the open prairie, and was prized as a guarantee of success in the hunting-field. On such expeditions, it has to be borne in view, they were not tempted by mere love of the chase or by the prospect of a supply of game. Winter-hunting supplies to the trapper the valued peltries of the fur-bearing animals; but they depended on the summer and autumn buffalo hunts for the supply of pemmican, which furnished one of the main resources of the whole Hudson Bay population. The summer hunt kept them abroad on the prairie from about the 15th of June to the end of August, and smaller bands resumed the hunt in the autumn. With this as the favourite and engrossing work of the tribe, it is inevitable that farming could be carried on only in the most desultory fashion. Nevertheless, the severity of the winter compelled them to make provision for the numerous horses and oxen on which the summer hunt depended; and thus habits of industry and forethought were engendered.

The half-breed hunters regarded the Sioux and Blackfeet as their natural enemies, and carried on warfare with them much after the fashion of the Indian tribes that have acquired fire-arms and horses; but they gave proof of their “Christian” civilisation by taking no scalps. In the field, whether preparing for hunting or war, the superiority of the half-breeds was strikingly apparent. They then evinced a discipline, courage, and self-control, of which the wild Sioux, Crees, or Blackfeet are wholly incapable; and they accordingly looked with undisguised contempt on their Indian foes.

Such are some of the most noticeable characteristics of this interesting race, called into being by the contact of the European with the native tribes of the forest and prairie. With so many of the elements of civilisation which it is found so hard to introduce among the most intelligent native tribes, an aptitude for social organisation, and a thorough independence of all external superintendence or control, there seems no reason to doubt that here is an example of an intermediate race, combining characteristics derived from two extremely diverse types of man, with all apparent promise of perpetuity and increase, if they could have been secured in the exclusive occupation of the region in which they have originated. But the railway has traversed the trail of the buffalo; and they have been compelled to make their choice between conformity to the industrial habits of agricultural settlers, or follow the herds of the buffalo in search of some remote wilderness beyond the shriek of the locomotive and the hail of the pioneer immigrant.

The inevitable revolution was not permitted to be inaugurated without very practical protest. The Red River Expedition of Sir Garnet Wolseley in 1870 was directed to put down a revolt of the half-breeds, under their leader, Louis Riel, resolute to oppose the intrusion of immigrant settlers. The struggle was renewed in 1885 under the same leader, but with the more legitimate grievance of neglected land claims, and the assertion of their rights to property in the prairie lands and on the river fronts. They were encountered by a Canadian volunteer force; Batoche, their little urban stronghold, was captured; and the North-West rebellion was brought to an end. But it was freely acknowledged that, poorly armed and ill-provided with the indispensable requisites for meeting a well-organised force of militia, under an experienced British soldier, General Middleton, they displayed unflinching courage, and held out bravely against overwhelming numbers furnished with the deadly appliances of modern warfare.

It could not be supposed that the invasion of the western hemisphere by the wanderers from the later homes of the Aryans beyond the Atlantic could reproduce in all respects the old phenomena that marked the displacement of Europe’s prehistoric races. But making due allowance for the changes wrought on the Aryan stock by the civilising influences of twenty centuries or more; and the consequent disparity between them and the rude hunter tribes of the American forests and prairies; much remains to aid us in the interpretation of the past. Ethnological investigation and induction enable us to realise the condition of Europe when its thinly-dispersed population consisted of a dark-skinned race, small in stature, and, as we may conceive, with hair and eyes of corresponding hue. Sepulchral deposits and the chance disclosures in their old cave-shelters have made us familiar with their physical form. Their modern representatives survive on the outskirts of Europe’s civilised centres. Still more, their ethnical characteristics have been perpetuated by the very same process as may now be seen in progress in the frontier states of America and the newest provinces of the Canadian Dominion. Not only are the modern representatives of Europe’s Allophyliæ to be found among the Lapps, Finns, and the Iberians of Northern and Western Europe; but everywhere in the British Isles, and throughout Western Europe, the Melanochroic elements stand out distinctly from the predominant Xanthocroic stock, among a people unconscious of any diversity of race. Here then we see evidences of the intermingling and the partial absorption of the Australioid savage of prehistoric Europe by the later Xanthocroi, the product of which survives in the brunette of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. In Britain the contrasting characteristics of the diverse ethnical elements attracted the attention of Tacitus in the first century of our era. In Spain the Iberian still preserves the evidence of an individuality apart from the Indo-European races in the vernacular Euskara, while a large Moorish element in the southern portion of the peninsula perpetuates the results of another foreign intrusion and interblending of races within historic times.

The diversity apparent in some of the results of the meeting of dissimilar races in the Old World and the New, is due to the geographical characteristics of the two hemispheres. Alike by sea and land, Europe could be entered by invading colonists, gradually, and at many diverse points. Hence, the aggression of the higher races may be assumed to have begun while the difference between them and the aborigines of Europe was much less than that which distinguishes the European from the Bed Indian savage. The conquest would thus be protracted over a period probably of many generations, and so would involve no such collisions as inevitably result in the destruction of savage races when brought into abrupt contact with those far advanced in civilisation.

But the peculiar relations of the frontier populations of the New World, and especially of the factors, trappers, and _voyageurs_ of the Hudson Bay Company, with the native tribes, helped to create a partial equality between the civilised European and the savage, and so to beget results akin to those which have left such enduring evidences of the mingling of diverse races in the population of Europe.

This accordingly suggests a question affecting the whole relations of British and European colonists generally to the native population of new lands settled and colonised by them. Not only English, Scotch, and Irish, but German, Norwegian, Icelandic, French, Polish, Russian, and Italian emigrants flock in thousands to the New World, merge in the common stock, and in the third generation learn to speak of themselves as “Anglo-Saxon!” The investigations of ethnologists have well-nigh put an end to the supposed purity of an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Scandinavian population in all but the assumed purely Celtic areas of the British Islands; and the latest system of ethnical classification is based on the recognition of the survival in the mixed population of modern Britain of a race-element which still perpetuates an enduring influence derived from aborigines of Europe anterior to the advent of Celt or Teuton. The power of absorption and assimilation of a predominant race is great; and ethnological displacement is no more necessarily a process of extinction now than in primitive times; though intermixture must ever be most easily effected where the ethnical distinctions are least strongly marked, and the conditions of civilisation are nearly akin.

The permanent survival of a disparate type in America perpetuating the evidences of the interblending of the Red and White races may be doubted. That some ineffaceable results will remain I cannot doubt; but the enormous disparity in numbers between the millions of European nationalities, and the little remnant of the native race brought in contact with them, precludes the possibility of results such as have perpetuated in the modern races of Europe elements derived from some of its earliest savage tribes.

It has indeed been such a favourite idea with some physiologists that in the undoubted developments of something like a distinct Anglo-American type, there is a certain approximation to the Indian, that Dr. Carpenter, in his _Essay on the Varieties of Mankind_, lays claim to originality in the idea “that the conformation of the cranium seems to have undergone a certain amount of alteration, even in the Anglo-Saxon race of the United States, which assimilates it in some degree to that of the aboriginal inhabitants.” This he dwells on in some detail, and arrives at what he seems to regard as an indisputable conclusion, that the peculiar American physiognomy to which he adverts presents a transition, however slight, toward that of the North American Indian. But the long-cherished opinion, to which Dr. Morton gave currency, of the existence of one special type of skull-form common to the whole aborigines of America, has been abandoned by all who have given any attention to the evidence which Dr. Morton’s own _Crania Americana_ supplies. I doubt if the idea of such an approximation of the Anglo-American to the Red Indian type would ever have occurred to a physiologist of Canada or of New England, to whom abundant opportunities for comparing the Indian and Anglo-American features, and of noting the actual transitional forms between the two, are accessible. But if such examples can be clearly recognised, they may be assigned with probability to a reverting to the type of some Bed ancestress whose blood is transmitted to a late descendant.

But it is otherwise with the millions of the Coloured race who now constitute the indigenous population of the Southern States. They are at home there in a climate to which the White race adapts itself with very partial success. The offspring of white fathers and of mothers of the African races, they have multiplied to millions; and now with the recently acquired rights of citizenship, and with the advantages of education within their reach, the country is their own. The very social prejudices against miscegenation protect them from the effacing influences to which the Indian half-breed is exposed by ever recurrent intermarriage with the dominant race. As yet, there are discernible the various degrees of heredity from the Mulatto to the Quinteron. But the abolishing of slavery has placed the Coloured race on an entirely new footing; and left as it now is, free to enjoy the healthful social relations of a civilised community, and protected by the very prejudices of race and caste from any large intermixture with the White race, it can scarcely admit of doubt that there will survive on the American continent a Melanocroi of its own, more distinctly separated from the White race, not only by heredity, but also by climatic influences, than the “dark Whites” of Europe are from the blonde types of Hellenic, Slavic, Teutonic, or Scandinavian stocks.

[148] _Reisen in Lykien_, etc., Vienna, 1889.

[149] Vide _History of the Negro Race in America_. G. W. Williams.

[150] _Science_, Feb. 13, 1891. A. F. Chamberlain.

[151] See p. 290.

VIII RELATIVE RACIAL BRAIN-WEIGHT AND SIZE

CONSISTENTLY with the recognition of the brain as the organ of intellectual activity, it seems not unnatural to assume for man, as the rational animal, a very distinctive cerebral development. One of the most distinguished of living naturalists, Professor Owen, has even made this organ the basis of a system of classification, by means of which he separates man into a sub-class, distinct from all other mammalia. But while a comparison between man and the anthropoid apes, as the animals most nearly approximating to him in physical structure, lends confirmation to the idea not only that a well-developed brain is essential to natural activity, but that there is a close relation between the development of the brain and the manifestation of intellectual power; the distinctive features in the human brain, as compared with those of the anthropomorpha, prove to be greatly less than had been assumed under imperfect knowledge. The substantial difference is in volume. “No one, I presume,” says Darwin, “doubts that the large size of the brain in man, relatively to his body, in comparison to that of the gorilla or orang, is closely connected with his higher mental powers”;[152] and it might not unfairly be reasoned from analogy, that the same test distinguishes the intellectual man from the stolid, and the civilised man from the savage. A careful study of the subject, however, shows some remarkable deviations from such a scale of progression. Attention is indeed directed to greatly more ample proofs of inequality between the organic source of power and the manifestations of mental energy; as, for example, in the ant, with its cerebral ganglia not so large as the quarter of a small pin’s head, displaying instincts and apparent affections of wonderful intensity and compass. Viewed in this aspect, “the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more marvellous than the brain of man.” Here, however, we look on elements of contrast rather than analogy; and seek in vain in this direction for any appreciable test of the soundness of the popular belief in the size of the brain as a measure of intellectual power. It is otherwise when we turn to the anthropomorpha. There, alike in the scientific and in the popular creed, very special and exceptional affinities to man are admitted; and a careful study of their anatomical structure tends to increase the recognised points of analogy.

Mr. Lockhart Clarke, in a contribution to Dr. Maudsley’s work on the Physiology and Pathology of Mind, gives a minute description of the concentric layers of nervous substance which combine to form the convolutions of the human brain; and of the forms and disposition of the various nerve-cells of which its vesicular structure consists. Comparing the human brain with those of other animals, he says: “Between the cells of the convolutions in man and those of the ape tribe I could not perceive any difference whatever; but they certainly differ in some respects from those of the larger mammalia: from those, for instance, of the ox, sheep, or cat.”[153] Apart from the difference in volume (55 to 115 cubic inches), the only distinctive features, according to Professor Huxley, between the brain of the anthropomorpha and that of man, are “the filling up of the occipito-temporal fissure; the greater complexity and less symmetry of the other sulci and gyri; the less excavation of the orbital face of the frontal lobe; and the larger size of the cerebral hemispheres, as compared with the cerebellum and the cerebral nerves.”

The brain of the orang is the one which seems most nearly to approximate to that of man. In volume it is about 26 or 27 cubic inches; or about half the minimum size of a normal human brain. The frontal height is greater than in that of other anthropomorpha; the frontal lobe is in all respects larger as compared with the occipital lobe; and certain folds of brain-substance, styled “bridging convulsions,” which in the human brain are interposed between the parietal and occipital lobes, also occur, though greatly reduced, in the brain of the orang; while they appear to be wholly wanting in the chimpanzee, the gibbon, and other apes which superficially present a greater resemblance to man. Referring to the convolutions of the central cerebral lobe, Huschke says: “With their formation in the ape, the brain enters the last stage of development until it arrives at its perfection in man”; and the higher class of brains may be arranged between the extremes of poorly and richly convoluted examples.

But it must not be overlooked that, apart from structural differences, relative, and not absolute mass and weight of brain has to be considered, otherwise the elephant and the whale would take the foremost place. “The brain of the porpoise,” Professor Huxley remarks,[154] “is quite wonderful for its mass, and for the development of the cerebral convolutions”; but it is the centre of a nervous system of corresponding capacity, while as compared with the size of the animal, the brain is not relatively large. Vogt states the weight of the human body to be to the brain, on an average, as 36 to 1; whereas in the most intelligent animals the difference is rarely less than 100 to 1.

Assuming the existence of some uniform relation between the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties, along with whatever is recognised as most closely analogous to them in the lower animals, it might be anticipated that we should find not only a graduated development of brain in the anthropomorpha as they approximate in resemblance to man; but, still more, that the progressive stages from the lowest savage condition to that of the most civilised nations should be traceable in a comparative size and weight of brain. Dr. Carl Vogt, after discussing certain minor and doubtful exceptions, thus proceeds: “We find that there is an almost regular series in the cranial capacity of such nations and races as, since historic times, have taken no part in civilisation. Australians, Hottentots, and Polynesians, nations in the lowest state of barbarism, commence the series; and no one can deny that the place they occupy in relation to cranial capacity and cerebral weight corresponds with the degree of their intellectual capacity and civilisation.”[155] But the position thus confidently assigned to the Polynesians receives no confirmation from the evidence supplied by the measurements of Dr. J. B. Davis, in his _Thesaurus Craniorum_; and a careful study of the subject reveals other remarkable deviations from such a scale of progression, not only in individuals but in races. To these exceptional deviations, with their bearing on the comparative capacity of races, the following remarks are chiefly directed. The largest and heaviest brains do indeed appear, for the most part, to pertain to the nations highest in civilisation, and to the most intelligent of their number. But this cannot be asserted as a uniform law, either in relation to races or individuals. The more carefully the requisite evidence is accumulated, the less does it appear that the volume of brain, or the cubic contents of the skull, supply a uniform gauge of intellectual capacity. In the researches which have thus far been instituted into the characteristics of the human brain among the lowest races, the development is in many respects remarkable; and, as was to be expected, no organic differences between diverse races of men have been traced.

Professor C. Luigi Calori has published the results of a careful examination of the brain of a negro of Guinea. It presented the marked excess of length over breadth so characteristic of the negro cranium; but in other respects it corresponded generally to the fully developed European brain. The distribution of the white and gray substances was the same; the cerebral convolutions were collected into an equal number of lobes; and the only special difference was that the convolutions were a little less frequently folded, and the separating sulci somewhat less marked than in the average European brain. But even in those respects the complication was great. The actual weight of the brain, according to Professor Calori, was 1260 grammes, equivalent to 44.4 cubic inches. The complexity of convolution, and consequent extension of superficies of the encephalon, appears to be an essential element in the development of the brain as the organ of highest mental capacity; and to the cerebrum, apparently, the true functions of intellectual activity pertain. Professor Wagner undertook the measurement of the convex surface of the frontal lobe in a series of brains. The heaviest, as a rule, had also the greatest development of surface. But the two elements were not in uniform ratio. Some of the lighter brains presented a much greater degree of convolution and consequent extent of convex superficies than others which ranked above them in weight. It is thus apparent that in estimating the comparative characteristics of brains, various elements are necessary for an exhaustive comparison. Besides the functional differences of the cerebrum, cerebellum, and pons varolii, they have different specific gravities, so that brains of equal weight may differ widely in quality. Dr. Peacock, taking distilled water as 1000, gives the values of the subdivisions of the brain thus: cerebrum, 1034; cerebellum, 1041; pons varolii, 1040. Again, Dr. Sankey states the mean specific gravity of the gray matter of the brain in either sex as 1034.6, and of the white matter as 1041.2. The variations from these results, as given by Bastian, Thurnam, and others, are trifling. But it is significant to note that recent researches show that where greater specific gravity of brain occurs in the insane, it appears to be limited to the gray matter.[156] Professor Goodsir maintained that symmetry of brain has more to do with the higher faculties than bulk of form. It is, at any rate, apparent that two brains of equal weight may differ widely in quality.