of America, in Van Dieman's Land, in New South Wales, and among
the Bushmen of the Cape, the experience of more than a hundred years
demonstrates that its destiny is extinction,--not restoration.
Individuals may be recovered by the labors of some zealous missionary;
but it is the fate of the race, after a few generations, to disappear.
It has fallen too hopelessly low to be restored. There remain curious
traces in the New World of these perished tribes. The Bible, translated
into an old Indian language, from which the devoted David Brainerd
taught so successfully a nation of Red Men, still exists; but it speaks
in a dead tongue, which no one can now understand; for the nation to
whom he preached has become extinct. And Humboldt tells us, in referring
to a perished tribe of South America, that there lived in 1806, when he
visited their country, an old parrot in Maypures, which could not be
understood, because, as the natives informed him, it spoke the language
of the Atures. Tribes of the aborigines of Australia have wholly
disappeared during the present generation; and I remember seeing it
stated in a newspaper paragraph, which appeared a few years ago, that
the last male survivor of the natives of Tasmania was at that time in
the latter stages of consumption.

But if man, in at least the more degraded varieties of the race, be so
palpably _not_ what the Creator originally made him, by whom, then, was
he made the poor lost creature which in these races we find him to be?
He was made what he is, I reply, by man himself; and this, in many
instances, by a process which we may see every day taking place among
ourselves in individuals and families, though happily, not in races.
Man's nature again,--to employ the condensed statement of the poet,--has
been bound fast in fate, but his will has been left free. He is free
either to resign himself to the indolence and self-indulgence so natural
to the species; or, "spurning delights, to live laborious days;"--free
either to sink into ignorant sloth, dependent uselessness, and
self-induced imbecility, bodily and mental, or to assert by honest labor
a noble independence,--to seek after knowledge as for hidden treasures,
and, in the search, to sharpen his faculties and invigorate his mind.
And while we see around us some men addressing themselves with stout,
brave hearts to what Carlyle terms, with homely vigor, their "heavy job
of work," and, by denying themselves many an insidious i