Throughout the northern, southern, and western states of America, on the Pacific slope, and in Canada, the growth of a mixed race of White and Indian blood has everywhere taken place in the first period of settlement, when the frontier backwoodsman and the hunter were brought into contact with the native tribes. Along the borders of every frontier state a nearly exclusive male population is compelled to accept the services of the Indian women in any attempt at domestic life. The children grow up to share in perfect equality the rude life of their fathers. The new generation presents a mixed race of hardy trappers, mingling the aptitudes of both races in the wild life of the frontier. With the increase of population, and the more settled life of the clearing, the traces of mixed blood are lost sight of; but it is to a large extent only a repetition of what appears to have marked the advent of the Aryan immigrants into Europe. The new, but more civilised race predominated. Literal extermination, no doubt, did its work, and the aborigines to a large extent perished. But no inconsiderable remnant finally disappeared by absorption into the general stock; not without leaving enduring evidence of the process in the Melanochroi, or dark whites—the Iberians, or Black Celts, as they are sometimes styled,—of Western Europe; as well as in the allied type, not only of the Mediterranean shores, but of Western Asia and Persia. A process has thus been going on on the American continent for four centuries, which cannot fail to beget new types in the future; even as a like process is seen to have produced them under analogous conditions in ancient Europe. Viewed in this aspect, the archæology and ethnology of the New World presents in some important respects a startling analogy to pre-Aryan Europe. Assuredly the status of the Allophylian races of Europe can scarcely have been inferior to that of some, at least, of the aborigines of America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Probably the Aryan pioneers were fully equal to its first European immigrants. But if the ethnical characteristics of American man are simple, and the aspect of his social life appears to realise for us a living analogy to that of Europe’s Neolithic, if not in some respects to that of its Palæolithic era, the question of his antiquity acquires a new interest; for it thus becomes apparent that man may remain through countless ages in the wild hunter stage, as unprogressive as any other denizen of the wilderness propagating its species and hunting for its prey. But the whole question of the antiquity of man has undergone a marvellous revolution. The literature of modern geology curiously illustrates its progress, from the date of the publication of Dean Buckland’s _Reliquiæ Diluvianæ_, in 1823, to the final edition of Sir Charles Lyell’s _Principles of Geology_, in 1872, and the latest embodiment of his conclusions on the special question involved in his _Antiquity of Man_.