evident enough. Perhaps there is no man living whose opinion on this matter should outweigh that of General Crook. Year after year, both as soldier and commissioner, he has been in actual contact with the various tribes of Red Men, and as a soldier he will not be accused of sentimentalism. He says:—

The proposition I make in behalf of the Indian is, that he is at this moment capable, with very little instruction, of exercising every manly right. He does not need so much guardianship as many people would have us believe. What he does need is protection under the law; the privilege of suing in the courts, which privilege, to be of the slightest value, must be founded upon the franchise.

I wish to say most emphatically that the American Indian is the intellectual peer of most, if not all, the various nationalities we have assimilated to our laws, customs, and language.

People who talk of the possibility' of civilising the Indian are ignorant of the progress made during the last decade. The Government schools at Hampton, Carlisle, Forest Grove, and other places have demonstrated not only the possibility but the astonishing aptitude for advancement shown by Indian children. After their course of instruction they return to their homes and forests as so many lanterns of civilisation and Christianity. I admit that, here and there, a pupil under the influence of his old surroundings has 'gone back' into barbarism. But if a lamp here and there go out in the darkness, shall no more lamps be lighted? The influence of these trained pupils among their less fortunate kindred is incalculable. Their manly deportment is emulated by their untutored brethren; they are efficient aids to the Christian mission-schools; they bring to their tribes unimpeachable evidence that the settlers, squatters, and (be it said with shame) some of the Government's agents, are not exponents nor samples of civilisation. Instances of the immediate influence exerted by these trained pupils are numerous. I shall note one, from 'The Record of Hampton's Returned Pupils'-in answer to the question whether the American Indians are willing to have their children taken to school.

...

A mother, who heard of our being on the Reservation, brought her boy sixty miles to ask us to take him. He is at Hampton to-day. After our leaving the Agency for the steamboat landing, some three miles off, a boy appeared, having ridden fifteen miles, and earnestly asked to be taken to school. We sent him to the Agency physician to be examined. He went at full speed, and returned, bringing a note from the doctor stating that the boy had enlargement of the thyroid gland, and had better not go. When told the contents of the note he was greatly disappointed, and volunteered to run the risk, insisting that he must go. He agreed, if too sick to stay at school, to pay his own way home (from Hampton, Virginia, a distance of 1,000 miles) by selling some cattle he had. Of course we brought that boy.

Voters of all shades, from white to ebon, are being made of worse material than such as that Red boy. With the ballot in his hand the Red Man will need no guardianship, no protection. He may bury his tomahawk. In his presence, political parties will vie with each other in the meekness of their salaams. His welfare, his health, his wife, and all his papooses, will suddenly become objects of tender solicitude. He will be agreeably surprised at his quick metamorphosis from a 'bloody savage' and a 'whooping hyena' into a full-blown gentleman with a presented button-hole posy on his lapel. But his surprise will gradually vanish as he learns the potency of that bit of talkingpaper-a power to send those sycophants to Washington or to the plough-tail-to hold a portfolio or a hoe-handle.

The severalty-allotment of land to the Indians will enable the Government to discontinue, gradually, the granting of subsidies, rations, &c.-a system that has wrought incalculable mischief, morally and physically. Its result is, naturally enough, to pauperise the donees-making them improvident, vagrant, contentious. It is radically wrong; for the Red Man is not slow to observe that the bellicose tribes are the favoured ones-obtaining their pensions more promptly, and their rations of better quality! I was struck with the pointed and really graphic way a good-natured Sioux put the case : Bad Indian shake tomahawk-raise shoot-gun, get pay quick! Me peace-Indian good, stay in teepee, papoose hungry; bimebye bread come 'long-sour! bimebye meat come 'long-stink! Me shake tomahawk too, guess bimebye!' Nor does the Indian fail to take another view of the subject, equally disheartening. He knows what he gives the white man is imperishable-the land lasts for all time; but what he receives in return is only for to-day, and sometimes for a day long past, as an Indian once remarked after driving his hatchet into a barrel of pork furnished by a knavish Agent: Pfew! guess Great Father meant um for last week!'

It is no longer necessary to inquire whether the Red Man will avail himself of the privilege of allodial tenure. Proof is at hand. A special treaty made with the Santee Sioux, in Northern Nebraska, provides that each Indian may assume a claim on the Reservation, and, in the event of his tilling and improving his land, can obtain from the Government a patent for his claim, and become at once a citizen. During the last year over one hundred of the Santee Sioux have availed themselves of the offer, and are now thrifty and happy -living in comfortable adobe houses, and courteously recognised by their white brethren. Why the Government does not grant similar privileges to other and equally worthy clans, is perhaps best known to those initiated in the mysteries of the lobby of the House. The Senate all honour to that noble body!--passed a Bill (the Coke Bill') which was satisfactory to the friends of the Indian; but it was

6

defeated in the House-defeated through the machinations of those men who fancy that the best land is ever around and under an Indian's wigwam, and, consequently, the best Indian is a dead one.' That Bill was defeated by the same spirit that now actuates the so-called Oklahoma Boomers in their scheme of aggression and robbery.

The unhappy, and to the Red Man disastrous, effects of the present system of dole and subsidy-giving a perishable commodity for an imperishable-in short the ill-effects of the general policy pursued towards the Indian, may be clearly shown by one example. For the Indians of Montana-the Blackfeet, the Piegan, and others-Congress made an appropriation for the year ending July 1, 1884, which by some unaccountable folly was 84,000 dollars less than what was asked for and deemed absolutely necessary by the Department. That deficiency and the delay in making the appropriation, together with the scarcity of game during the season, brought indescribable misery upon that poor people. It is estimated that during the spring and summer of last year, four hundred Indians of Montana died from starvation. At the Blackfeet Agency from four to six burial boxes were issued daily to a population of twenty-five hundred. Around Fort Belknap-a large military establishment--the suffering was apparently less. But the means adopted for mitigating these horrors, or rather the conditions exacted by the civilised' white population for such mitigation, are infamous, revolting, incredible. There are truths that should make the pen of the writer to tremble, and the reader to shudder, and we must turn away from these atrocious crimes. But when a suffering people, defrauded of their heritage and their bread, are saved from starvation by the sacrifice of the purity and innocence of wives and daughters, the truth should be known to the world, however revolting and humiliating it may be to our civilisation.

The remedy for these monstrous evils, and for all the woes of the Red Man, is in granting to him the rights of citizenship-rights that are not withheld from the most degraded white man or black. These rights can be acquired only through legislation, and this through the influence and pressure of public opinion. To invigorate that influence the good men and the good women of America are labouring to place before the world the simple truth concerning the Red Man.

One of the chief obstacles in the way of progress is the antagonism of certain politicians and writers for the press, who, urged on by their greedy constituents and patrons of the border, falsify the condition of the Red Man, and blacken his character. The fabrications of these men in their attempts to debase the Indian in the sight of the world, in order to instigate a crusade upon his territory, show a talent that in a better cause would be potent indeed. Their hostility to the friends of the Red Man, to the advancement of education, and even to Christianity itself, is perhaps always to be expected, and can be bravely

met. But their slanders, cast upon a people whose lips are closed, are even more abominable. The silent Red Man can utter no Macedonian cry; but may he not look up into the faces of Christian men and Christian women for his vindication-even to the eminent prompters of public opinion, abroad as well as at home?

J. H. MCNAUGHTON.

DEATH.

THE universality of death amongst the visible living creation is so striking a fact that it is not surprising that death has been through all time regarded as one of the properties which characterise living matter. Living bodies have often been distinguished from non-living bodies by the mode in which their existence is terminated, and hence a termination by death has been considered one of the characteristics of life.

Any one bold enough to attack the general proposition that 'death is the end of life' is likely to be rather severely criticised, for if he succeeds in proving this statement to be false, what will all those poets and moralists do who never seem to tire of reiterating the mortality of all living beings? In spite of such considerations, a distinguished German philosopher, Professor Weismann, has been recently led, in a series of most interesting speculations on the nature of heredity, the duration of life, &c., to throw some doubt upon the generally assumed statement that death is dependent upon causes lying in the nature of life itself, or that all living beings bear the seeds of death. In these speculations Professor Weismann points out the fact, which naturalists hitherto seem to have overlooked, that death is by no means an attribute of all living organisms. But before considering the accuracy of this statement, it will be advantageous to clear the ground by some preliminary considerations as to the nature of the organic world.

All living organisms, whether plants or animals, consist of one or more cells, and in accordance with this fact they may be classed in two great divisions: the Unicellular, and the Multicellular. The unicellular animals are termed Protozoa, the unicellular plants Protophyta; the multicellular animals and plants Metazoa and Metaphyta respectively. It is unnecessary to point out that the unicellular organisms present the phenomena of life in their simplest and most elementary forms, but in order to clearly understand Professor Weismann's views, it will be worth while to review the life-history of some such typical unicellular form as the Amoeba.

The Amoeba is an animal of such a simple nature that it may be looked upon as the biologist's unit. It forms the starting-point from which both morphologists and physiologists set out to study the