Here then are materials full of promise for the ethnical student:—the Red-Man, indigenous, seemingly aboriginal, and still in what it is customary to call a state of nature; the Negro, with many African attributes uneffaced, systematically precluded until very recent years from the free reception of the civilisation with which he has been brought in contact, but subjected nevertheless to novel influences of climate, food, and all external appliances; the White-Man also undergoing the transforming effects of climate, amid novel social and political institutions; and all three extreme types of variety or race testing, on a sufficiently comprehensive scale, their capacity for a fertile intermingling of blood. The period, moreover, is in some respects favourable for summing up results, as changes are at work which mark the close of a cycle in the novel conditions to which one at least of the intruded races has been subjected for upwards of three centuries. In Europe we study man only as he has been moulded by a thousand external circumstances. The arts, born at the very dawn of history, give form to its modern social life. The faith and morals nurtured among the hills of Judah, the intellect of Greece, the jurisprudence and military prowess of Rome, and the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of medieval Christendom, have all helped to make of us what we are: till in the European of the nineteenth century it becomes a curious question how much pertains to the man, and how much to that civilisation, of which he is in part the author and in part the offspring? In vain we strive to detach European man from elements foreign to him, that we may look on him as he is or was by nature; for he only exists for us as the product of all those multifarious elements which have accumulated along the track of countless generations. The very serf of the Russian steppes cannot grow freely, as his nomad brother of Asia does; but must don the unfamiliar fashions of the Frank, as strange to him as the armour of Saul upon the youthful Ephrathite. Is, then, civilisation natural to man; or is it only a habit or condition artificially superinduced, and as foreign to his nature as the bit and bridle to the horse, or the truck-cart to the wild ass of the desert? Such questions involve the whole ethnological problem reopened by Lamarck, Agassiz, Darwin, Huxley, and others. Whence is man? What are his antecedents? What—within the compass with which alone science deals,—are his future destinies? Does civilisation move only through limited cycles, repeating in new centuries the work of the old; attaining, under some varying phase, to the same maximum of our imperfect humanity, and then, like the wandering comet, returning from the splendour of its perihelion back to night?