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In a few cases two colors were intermixed in the same ear. It seemed probable that this the primitive maize of the American aborigines, from which all other varieties have been developed. A few cobs which we found at a cliff house on the Mancos River corresponded with the Conejos ear in size, and were probably the same variety.
If the son was strong enough to hold the office through his own life and to hand it to his son, the idea soon became fixed that the chiefship belonged in that particular family. This was the beginning of kingship. But our aborigines had not developed any such absurd notion as that there are particular families to which God has given the privilege of lording it over their fellow men.
He was a convinced rebel against any fire for food, making known to any one who would listen that man had erred sadly, thousands of years ago, in bringing fire into his cave for cooking, and that the only cure for civilization's evils was in abolishing the kitchen. He would live in the Marquesas as he said the aborigines do. Alas! I did not tell him they ate only their fish raw.
It is true, the European intruders pay no respect to these Aboriginal divisions of the territory, the black native being often hunted off his own ground, or destroyed by European violence, dissipation, or disease, just as his kangaroos are driven off that ground by the European's black cattle; but this surely does not alter the case as to the right of the Aborigines.
Beside this, before a science of ethnology applied to the American aborigines can come into existence, the misconceptions, and erroneous interpretations which now encumber the original memorials must be removed. Unless this can in some way be effectually accomplished, this science can never be established among us.
THE ARYAN INVADERS. The history of India opens with glimpses of a struggle on the borders of the great rivers, first of the Indus and then of the Ganges, between an invading race, the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans from the north-west, and the dusky aborigines. These rude native tribes have left few relics but their tombs.
The Spaniards were not content with putting the aborigines to labor far beyond their power of endurance on the soil where they were born, but shipped them by hundreds to Spain to be sold in the slave-market of Seville, the proceeds being turned into the royal treasury. Columbus himself was the promoter of this outrageous return for the hospitality he had received at the hands of the natives.
And as I may not have to return to Miles Square, I think it right here to state that he did go with me to Australia, and did succeed, first as a shepherd, next as a superintendent, and finally, on saving money, as a landowner; and that in spite of his opinions of the unholiness of war, he was no sooner in possession of a comfortable log homestead than he defended it with uncommon gallantry against an attack of the aborigines, whose right to the soil was, to say the least of it, as good as his claim to my uncle's acres; that he commemorated his subsequent acquisition of a fresh allotment, with the stock on it, by a little pamphlet, published at Sydney, on the "Sanctity of the Rights of Property;" and that when I left the colony, having been much pestered by two refractory "helps" that he had added to his establishment, he had just distinguished himself by a very anti-levelling lecture upon the duties of servants to their employers.
They were the scourge of God upon the aborigines of the continent, and were themselves used up, stock, lash, and snapper, in the tremendous flagellation which was administered through them to almost every branch, in turn, of the great Algonquin family.
Such is certainly the object of a like custom on the part of the Australian aborigines; there being this difference, however, that the art of the latter considered as art is wholly inferior.
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