The Indian does not believe in the superiority of the white man. The difference between them is only such as he discerns between the social, constructive beaver, and the solitary, cunning fox. The Great Spirit implanted in each his peculiar faculties; why should the one covet the nature of the other? Hence one element of the unhopeful Indian future. The progress of the white man offers even less incentive to his ambition than the cunning of the fox, or the architectural instincts of the beaver. He, at least, does not overlook, in his sylvan philosophy, that feature in the physical history of mankind, which Agassiz complained of having been neglected: viz., the natural relations between different types of man and the animals and plants inhabiting the same regions. Yet the Indian of the American wilds is no more primeval than his forests. Beneath the roots of their oldest giants lie memorials of an older native civilisation; and the American ethnologist and naturalist, while satisfying themselves of the persistency of a common type, and of specific ethnical characteristics prevailing throughout all the widely-scattered tribes of the American continent,[2] have been studying only the temporary supplanters of nations strange to us as the extinct life of older geological periods. In that old East, to which science still turns when searching for the cradle-land of the human family, vast areas exist, the characteristics of which seem to stamp with unprogressive endurance the inheritors of the soil. Along the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Levant, and stretching from the Persian Gulf into the fertile valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris, are still found seats of civilisation coexistent with the earliest dawn of man’s history. But beyond these lies the elevated table-land of Central Asia, stretching away northward, and pouring its waters into inland seas, or directing their uncivilising courses into the frozen waters of the Arctic circle. Abrupt mountain-chains subdivide this elevated plateau into regions which have been for unrecorded ages the hives of pastoral tribes, unaffected by any intrusion of civilising arts or settled social habits; until, impelled by unknown causes, they have poured southward over the seats of primitive Asiatic civilisation, or westward into the younger continent of Europe.