A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of AmericaFerrall, S. A. (Simon Ansley)
History
A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America
Ferrall, S. A. (Simon Ansley)
United States -- Description and travel
died by a blow on the skull. The blood had coagulated there into a mass,
of a texture and colour sufficiently marked to shew that it had been
blood. The envelope of the body was double. Two splendid blankets,
completely woven with the most beautiful feathers of the wild turkey,
arranged in regular stripes and compartments, encircled it. The cloth on
which these feathers were woven, was a kind of linen of neat texture, of
the same kind with that which is now woven from the fibres of the nettle.
The body was evidently that of a female of middle age, and I should
suppose that her majesty weighed, when I saw her, six or eight pounds."
The silly attempts that have been made to establish an oriental origin for
the North American Indians, have never produced any other conviction in an
unbiased mind, than that the _facts_ brought forward to support that
theory existed only in the imaginations of those who advanced them. The
colour, the form, the manners, habits, and propensities of the Indians,
all combine to establish that they are a distinct race of human beings,
and could never have emanated from any people of European, Asiatic, or
African origin. The notion that climate would be sufficient to produce an
essential change in the appearance of any number of individuals, cannot
now be maintained; since from the discovery of America, Europeans,
Africans, and Indians have inhabited all regions of this vast continent,
without undergoing the slightest characteristic change from the
descendants of the original stock, who have remained in their primitive
locations. The Power that induces the existence of plants and lower
animals indigenous to the different sections of the earth, seems also to
induce the existence of a race of men peculiar to the regions in which
they are found.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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