lays up stores.

_August 4._--This day we sailed away from Hopedale, heading
homeward,--leaving behind a race of men who were, to me a problem to be
solved, if possible. All my impressions of them are summed in the
epithet, often repeated, pre-Adamite. In applying, this, I affirm
nothing respecting their physical origin. All that is to me an open
question, to be closed when I have more light than now. It may be, that,
as Mr. Agassiz maintains, they were created originally just as they are.
For this hypothesis much may be said, and it may be freely confessed
that in observing them I felt myself pressed somewhat toward the
acceptance of it as a definite conclusion. It may be that they have
become what they are by slow modification of a type common to all
races,--that, with another parentage, they have been made by adoption
children of the icy North, whose breath has chilled in their souls the
deeper powers of man's being. This it will be impossible for me to deny
until I have investigated more deeply the influence of physical Nature
upon man, and learned more precisely to what degree the traditions of a
people, constituting at length a definite social atmosphere, may come to
penetrate and shape their individual being. I do not pronounce; I wait
and keep the eyes open. Doubtless they are God's children; and knowing
this, one need not be fretfully impatient, even though vigilantly
earnest, to know the rest.

In naming them pre-Adamite I mean two things.

First, that they have stopped short of ideas, that is, of the point
where human history begins. They belong, not to spiritual or human, but
to outward and physical Nature. There they are a great success.

Secondly, in this condition of mere response to physical Nature, their
whole being has become shapen, determined, fixed. They have no future.
Civilization affects them, but only by mechanical modification, not by
vital refreshment and renewal. The more they are instructed, the weaker
they become.

They change, and are unchangeable.

Unchangeable: if they assume in any degree the ideas and habits of
civilization, it is only as their women sometimes put on calico gowns
over their seal-skin trousers. The modification is not even skin-deep.
It is a curious illustration of this immobility, that no persuasion, no
authority, can make them fishermen. Inseparable from the sea-shore, the
Esquimaux will not catch a fish, if he can catch a dinner otherwise. The
missionaries, b