native tribes met on common ground, engaged in the same pursuits, all tending to foster the habits of hunter-life; and so presenting a close analogy to the condition of Europe when, in its Neolithic age, its rude hunter tribes were invaded by the Aryans. Thus engaged to a large extent in the same pursuits, the Whites and Indians of the Canadian North-West have dwelt together for successive generations on terms of comparative equality, and with results of curious interest, hereafter referred to, in relation to the intermingling of the races. In the long-settled provinces of Canada it has been otherwise. There the aborigines had to be gathered together on suitable reserves, and induced to accommodate themselves in some degree to the habits of an industrious agricultural population; or to be driven out, to wander off into the great hunting-grounds of the uncleared West. The exterminating native wars, which preceded the settlement of Upper Canada, greatly facilitated this; and the tribes with which the English colonists of Ontario have had to deal have been for the most part immigrants, not greatly less recent than themselves. As to the Six Nation Indians settled on the Grand River and at the Bay of Quinté (the most numerous and the farthest advanced in civilisation of all the Indians in the British provinces), they are a body of loyalist refugees who followed the fortunes of their English allies on the declaration of independence by the revolted Colonies; and there is now in use, at the little Indian Church at Tuscarora, the silver Communion Plate presented to their ancestors while still in the valley of the Mohawk, in the State of New York, the gift of Her Majesty Queen Anne, “to her Indian Chappel of the Mohawks.”[151] But the civilisation which has thus resulted from prolonged and intimate relations with the Whites, has been accompanied by an inevitable admixture of blood, of which the results are abundantly manifest in the physical characteristics of the Indian settlers, both on the Grand river and at the Bay of Quinté. The system of adopting members of other tribes, including even those of their vanquished foes, to recruit their own numbers, was practised by many of the North American tribes, and was familiar to the Iroquois, or Indians of the Five Nations, as they were styled before the admission of the Tuscaroras to their confederacy. In 1649, for example, the survivors of two of the Huron towns which they had ravaged, besought the favour of the victors, and were adopted into the Seneca nation. Nor did extreme differences of race interfere with affiliation, as in the case of children kidnapped from the White colonists in their vicinity. One interesting example of the latter suffices to illustrate the extent to which such a process tended to affect the ethnical purity of the race.