it would produce, but to my disappointment it did not excite them or elicit any expression of wonder. Even the steam whistle failed to move them; they did not understand it and would not exhibit surprise. Two years later a brig sailed up the river and the Indians were full of excitement. The size of the sails and the strength of the ropes came within their comprehension, filling them with wonder. The task of gathering fibre enough to weave so much cloth, and such ropes, made the white man a wonderful worker in their estimation.

It has been customary to attribute certain general qualities to whole tribes of Indians, and this has been done to those of whom I have written. I can only say that no two Indians of my acquaintance were alike, and their mode of life would naturally develop individuality of character.

The charges of lying and stealing, as urged against them, have some foundation in fact, although the Indian might make some such defence as our soldiers made to the accusation of theft of honey and chickens while marching through the South during our late war. They did not steal, they took what they wanted and expected to live on the enemy. No Indian can steal from his tribe, however, without losing his character, and their desire to have position in the tribe makes both men and women as careful of their reputations as those in civilized life. Indians and white men cannot live side by side happily, nor without fighting till the white man is acknowledged master. The Indian is cat-like, attached to localities, and kills only such game as he needs for food; he is stealthy by nature, and patiently waits his opportunity to strike. The white man is migratory and carries his attachments to strange lands, making his home where his ambition or nature attracts him, and is destructive alike to game or forests. The Indian, if he become an obstacle, is classed with wild animals, and is hunted to the death; this antagonism becomes mutual and is perhaps as natural as the antipathies of cats and dogs.

The early settlement of New England was attended by the horrors of Indian warfare, and this struggle is the same to-day as then, but farther west on the plains of Colorado and Arizona. The Indians of California are now fed on government rations, and instead of elk and antelope the land is grazed by herds and flocks of domestic animals owned by the white men, and enumerated and taxed as one of the largest items of wealth in a rich state. The present policy of the government of removing Indians from disputed lands, and settling them upon reservations, is perhaps the best thing that can be done, but much of the management of Indians in the past has been a shameful record of fraud, by the agents of our government who represented the public. money-bag, and of outrages committed on emigrants by the Indians.

Many of the Indian agents, in their greed for gain, supplied hostile tribes with rifles, ammunition and whiskey in exchange for furs and even property captured from the white settlers. Whisky that may only make a fool of the white man converts an Indian into a fiend, and when drunk he may kill friend or foe. The individual settler, exposed to attack, regards the Indians as brutal and dangerous, and loses faith in his government if it rewards with presents the wretch who has murdered his companions, and may at any time attack him by surprise and butcher his wife and children.

Our government is now powerful enough to warrant the exercise of authority and mercy. It is folly to purchase peace of such a people by paying them tribute, as the Indians themselves seek to propitiate evil spirits by gifts of beads; and it cannot be right to make "Black Kettle” a present of a Colt's revolver, after he has already used his rifle and knife on more white victims than any brave of his tribe.

The Indians whom I have particularly described in this paper, have been shown to possess the virtues of generosity and hospitality without the least knowledge of Christianity, and

it is a mortifying fact that the early explorers in this country generally found welcome and hospitality among the Indians before the white traders had corrupted them. Now it is dif ficult to find a tribe that a white man cares to visit unless with the balance of power on his side. Indian cunning even has not proved equal to the duplicity of the white man. You may have heard of the Indian who offered his beaver skins for sale to a trader in olden times in one of our Puritan villages, when the trader was on his way to church. The trader would not purchase then, but in a whisper stated a price. When the church was dismissed the Indian followed the trader home and demanded payment for his skins, but was forced to accept a less price than was first named. The Indian took the money but told an acquaintance that he had discovered the use of the big meeting at the church,—"it was to lower the price of beaver skins."

As a white man I take the side of the pioneer in defence of his family, but I wish the Indians could have been spared much of the degradation brought upon them by bad white men that must eventually end in complete subjection, or extermination.

NOTE. All the figures not otherwise designated, are drawn from memory.

- EDS.

THE TIME OF THE MAMMOTHS.

BY PROF. N. 8. SHALER.

WE must ask the reader to go with us into the remote past; back beyond the time when man invaded the primitive forests and disturbed the abundant life which covered the prairies around the great inland seas of our continent; still farther back until we come to a time when very different animals from those now living there, roamed those woods and fields. We thus come to a time remote when measured

by the usual standards of duration, yet only a geological yesterday. Once such journeys as we propose making were very difficult, and attended with dangers to soul, if not to body, which might well make any but the stout hearted investigator hesitate. But now that the wall, which once divided the preadamic time from the present, has been so frequently breached and trodden over by those bound on expeditions into an even more remote past than that to which we seek to penetrate, we may set out on our journey without fear of meeting with a reception, on our return, which might make us wish that we had stayed among the monsters of that ancient time.

We will not strain the imagination of the reader by asking him to conjure up a picture of land and sea unlike that given by our present continents and oceans. He need not flatten out mountain chains, or dry up river systems, in order to represent to himself a true picture of the theatre which bore the actors of the scenes we are about to describe. Our good old continent was much the same then as now. All the changes which have taken place would fall within the limits of error of the maps of the past few decades. The unceasing agents of change operating through water, have done much work; but a little longer delta to the Mississippi, a somewhat greater projection of Florida to the southward, a lessened area of the great lakes of the north-west, are about all the more important changes which have been accomplished since the time of which we speak.

In order to come in contact with living elephants and mastodons, we need not go so far into the history of our continent as to traverse the glacial period. Long after the time when this great ice envelope shrouded the northern half of this continent, the great pachyderms continued to form the most important feature in the life of our continent. If we wish to go back to the time when these great animals first came into our fields and forests we must ascend much farther into the past, beyond two or more glacial periods,

with the long intervals of repose between them. During the middle and later tertiary periods elephantine life had its highest development; a half a dozen or more species lived then on the surface of the European continent, and only a portion of the then existing forms may be known to us. The importance of the elephant life of this time may be better estimated by comparing the number of large mammals belonging to any one family now existing in the same area. Only three or four species of the family of cervidæ, to which the common deer belongs, have existed in Europe since the glacial period. Among the bulls not more than two species are known to have lived during the same time. Nor among the large carnivora, the bears or wolves, have the species been more numerous. We must seek among the smaller of the existing mammals, among the squirrels or mice, for the same richness in specific representation as we find among the elephants of the tertiaries. The variety in size and form seems to have been very great; the smallest species was not over three or four feet high, while the largest stood as high as any of our living elephants, towering to the height of ten or twelve feet. We know too little of the geology of the other continents of the old world to say whether this exceeding richness in large elephants at this stage of the earth's history was also found there. We know, however, that India, where one of the two remaining species of elephants lives, was thronged with these animals at this time, and although Africa was probably then separated from the other continents. with which it is now closely united by seas of considerable width, it, too, probably bore an abundance of the same life. We do not know the character of the life of the middle tertiary time in North America with anything like the accuracy that we do that of Europe during the same time. The investigations which are to enable us to form a clearly defined picture of the life of that time, on our own continent, are yet to be made. It seems likely, however, that during the time when elephants were so remarkable a feature in the life