come among them? These and many similar questions may be asked, either by curiosity or in the interest of humanity, or in the service of ethnologic science. Mr. Parkman contributes more abundant and more instructive means for discussing and for deciding these questions in the light of authenticated facts, and of fair deductions from them, than do all who have preceded him on the subject. In an Essay, introductory to his present volume, he embodies the results of many years of study, research, and personal observation concerning our Northern aborigines,--their tribal, treaty, and confederate relations, their distribution and numbers, their government, their family life, their customs, modes of subsistence, and warfare, their character and traits, their intellectual stage, their superstitions, their religious notions and observances. It is evident that his task, to this extent, was made an exacting one, not only by its inherent difficulties and complications, but by the misleading and guess-work representations of other writers who have been accepted as authorities. He makes stupendous reductions from the romance which has invested Indian character and life. "The noble savage," the ideal of so much fanciful and morbid sentimentality, becomes in his pages the representative of quite other qualities than those ascribed to him. In all that constitutes and ennobles manhood, and in all the conditions which should elevate the human above the brute creature, the savage and his lot are wanting.