Under all these disadvantages in the state of medicine, among civilized nations, do more in proportion die of the diseases peculiar to them, than of fevers, casualties, and old age, among the Indians? If we take our account from the city of London, we shall find this to be the case. Near a twentieth part of its inhabitants perish one year with another. Nor does the natural increase of inhabitants supply this yearly waste. If we judge from the bills of mortality, the city of London contains fewer inhabitants, by several thousands, than it did forty years ago. It appears from this fact, and many others of a like nature, which might be adduced, that although the difficulty of supporting children, together with some peculiar customs of the Indians, which we mentioned, limit their number, yet they multiply faster, and die in a smaller proportion than civilized nations, under the circumstances we have described. The Indians, we are told, were numerous in this country, before the Europeans settled among them. Travellers agree likewise in describing numbers of both sexes who exhibited all the marks of extreme old age. It is remarkable that age seldom impairs the faculties of their minds. The mortality peculiar to those Indian tribes who have mingled with the white people, must be ascribed to the extensive mischief of spiritous liquors. When these have not acted, they have suffered from having accommodated themselves too suddenly to the European diet, dress, and manners. It does not become us to pry too much into futurity; but if we may judge from the fate of the original natives of Hispaniola, Jamaica, and the provinces on the continent, we may venture to foretel, that, in proportion as the white people multiply, the Indians will diminish; so that in a few centuries they will probably be entirely extirpated[17]. [17] Even the influence of CHRISTIAN principles has not been able to put a stop to the mortality introduced among the Indians, by their intercourse with the Europeans. Dr. Cotton Mather, in a letter to sir William Ashurst, printed in Boston, in the year 1705, says, "that about five years before there were about thirty Indian congregations in the southern parts of the province of Massachusetts-Bay." The same author, in his history of New-England, says, "That in the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, there were 3000 _adult_ Indians, 1600 of whom professed the christian religion." At present there is but _one_ Indian congregation in the whole Massachusetts province. It may serve to extend our knowledge of diseases, to remark, that epidemics were often observed to prevail among the Indians in Nantucket, without affecting the white people.