On that eventful morning nearly four centuries ago, when the spell of uncertainty and mystery which enshrouded the Atlantic was broken, and the darkness of the deep vanished with the darkness of the night, the illustrious admiral discovered a world populated with beings like himself. They were male and female, with all the physical characteristics common to the rest of mankind, and differed from the Spaniards only in that their skin was of a copper hue, and their cheek bones more prominent. They were tattooed and wore their straight black hair, cut short above the ears, with a few unshorn locks falling upon their shoulders.[1] These naked uncivilized men and women were the same in their physical type with those discovered subsequently on the islands and the main land by the Cabots, Vespucius, Verrezano, and Cartier. To rehearse their descriptions of the natives whom they first met would be but to repeat the experience and observations of Columbus. Nearly five centuries earlier the Norse adventurer Thorwald Ericson (1002 A.D.) encountered natives on the New England coast, corresponding in appearance, habits, and condition to those who occupied the country when colonized by the first settlers. To these natives they gave the name of _Skrellings_, from _skraekja_, a name which they had previously applied to the Eskimo, meaning _to cry out_.[2] Thorfin Karlsefne, who also reached the New England coast four years later than Thorwald, describes the natives as sallow-colored and ill-looking, having ugly heads of hair, large eyes and broad cheeks. They came in canoes to his ships for the purposes of trade, and though peaceable at first, soon exhibited hostility and treachery.[3] It is probable that these Skrellings were North American Indians, who had interbred with the Atlantic Coast Eskimo. How long the red man’s occupation of the country antedated its discovery by the Scandinavians is uncertain. His traditions are worthless on that subject. His chronology of moons and cycles is an incoherent and contradictory jumble. Nor does he know any more certainly from whence he came. It would seem that his race came by installments, if it came at all, and that he was just as far advanced in the arts of hunting and war and domestic life on the day in which he first possessed himself of the soil, as on that in which he was driven from it by the European. Only under the fostering care of the white man has he shown any improvement, and that has been of such an uncertain character as to amount to proof of his incapacity for self-civilization. The Indian, measured by his low condition in the scale of progress from the extremest barbarism towards semi-civilization, belongs to what is known as the flint age (old-stone or Palæolithic) in Europe, in which the rudest flint implements seem to have been the chief auxiliaries which he possessed with which to supplement and assist his hands in securing a livelihood or to protect his person and family from ferocious beasts.