Though nominally under the dominion of the European race, yet a considerable part of tropical America still remains in the undisturbed possession of its native tribes. While the stranger has established his chief settlements along the coast or in those parts of the interior which before his arrival were already the seats of a certain degree of culture, where before him the Incas had founded cities and a large agricultural population occupied the fertile table-lands of Anahuac, the wild hunter, unsubjected to the rules and trammels of civilised life, still roams over the boundless woods or interminable savannahs through which the Amazons, the Orinoco, and a hundred other great streams wend their way from the Andes to the Ocean. Here the primitive American can still be studied; here he exhibits the same traits of character and follows the same mode of life as his fathers before him, in the times of Cortez or Pizarro. Many of the forest tribes, indeed, have been converted to Christianity, and live in missions or small settlements situated far apart on the banks of the great rivers; others are willing to barter the drugs, india-rubber, or rare birds and insects, they gather in the woods for articles of European manufacture; but many desiring no more than what their native wilds supply, never or but seldom cross the path of civilised man. Though divided into a large number of hostile tribes, and scattered over an immense extent of country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and far beyond the bounds which separate one tropic from the other, yet the American Indians so nearly resemble each other, both in their features and the qualities of their minds, as evidently to be descended from one source. Their complexion is of a reddish-brown, more or less resembling the colour of copper. There is, however, a great diversity of shade among the several tribes, which appears to be less dependent on the influence of climate than on an original disposition, varying in the different branches of the American race. The elevation above the sea, or the vicinity of the equator, seems to have no great influence, for both Ulloa and Humboldt were astonished to find the Indians as bronze-coloured or as brown in the cold regions of the Cordilleras as in the hot plains of Venezuela. On the sultry banks of the Orinoco there are even tribes characterised by a remarkable fairness of complexion, living in the vicinity of others more than commonly brown. D’Orbigny makes this lightness of colour coincide with the woody and shady character of the quarters inhabited; the Maripas, for instance, who inhabit the most exposed countries, being also the darkest in hue.