half the soil of a lake which has yet to be reduced to the economical proportion he intends to allow it. The two races cannot plainly long reside on the same continent; but Mr Wilson brings before us a fact which will probably be new to most English readers. It is almost as much an absorption into the white race as a process of extinction that is now going on amongst the Red Indians. Wherever the whites, whether they are French, or English, or Scotch, have been long settled in the neighbourhood of Indian tribes, there has grown up a mixed race or half-breed. This half-breed, in some instances, remains in the settlement of the whites, but in others it still follows the mode of life of its Indian parent, and a race grows up that is neither European nor Indian. Whole tribes seem now to be constituted of this half-breed, and they are distinguished for their power of endurance and their greater faculty for social organisation. But in proportion as they approximate to the European, the less likelihood is there that they will long remain distinct and separated from the European by their mode of life. “The idea,” says Mr Wilson, “of the absorption of the Indian into the Anglo-American race will not, I am aware, meet with a ready acceptance, even from those who dwell where its traces are most perceptible; but fully to appreciate its extent, we must endeavour to follow down the course of events by which the continent has been transferred to the descendants of its European colonists. At every fresh stage of colonisation or pioneering into the wild west, the work has necessarily been accomplished by the hardy youths, or the hunters and trappers of the clearing. Rarely indeed did they carry with them their wives or daughters; but where they found a home amongst savage-haunted wilds, they took to themselves wives of the daughters of the soil. To this mingling of blood, even in its least favourable aspects, the prejudices of the Indian presented little obstacle. Henry, in his narrative of travel among the Cristineaux, says, ‘One of the chiefs assured me that the children borne by their women to Europeans were bolder warriors and better hunters than themselves.’ The fact is unquestionable that all along the widening outskirts of the newer clearings, and wherever an outlying trading or hunting post is established, we find a fringe of half-breed population, marking the transitional border-land which is passing away from its aboriginal claimants.... At all the white settlements near those of the Indians the evidence of admixture is abundant, from the pure half-breed to the slightly-marked remoter descendant of Indian maternity, discoverable only by the straight black hair, and a singular watery glaze in the eye, not unlike that of the English gypsy. There they are to be seen, not only as fishers, trappers, and lumberers, but engaged on equal terms with the whites in the trade and business of the place.