These isolated Sioux are the
Winebagoes; the others being the Dahcota, the Yankton, the Teton, the
Upsaroka, the Mandan, the Minetari, the Missouri, the Osage, the Konzas,
the Ottos, the Omahaws, the Puncas, the Ioways, and the Quappas,--all
American, _i.e._, belonging to the United States.

None of the Sioux tribe come in contact with the sea. None of them
belong to the great _forest_ districts of America. Most of them hunt
over the country of the buffalo. This makes them warlike, migratory
hunters; with fewer approaches to agricultural or industrial
civilization than any Indians equally favoured by soil and climate.

Of this class the Assineboins are the British representatives. They are
the chief _Red River_ aborigines.

It is the Iroquois, the Sioux, and certain members of the Algonkin
stock, upon which the current and popular notions of the American
Indian, the _Red Man_, as he is called--

The Stoic of the woods, the man without a tear, &c.,

have been formed. The Athabaskans, on the other hand, have not
contributed much to our notions on this point. In the first place, they
are less known; in the next, they are less typical.

But this raises their value in the eyes of the ethnologist; and the very
fact of their possessing certain characteristics, in a comparatively
slight degree, makes them all the fitter for illustrating the phenomena
of _transition_.

Previous, however, to this, we must get our other _extreme_. This is to
be found in the ethnology of--

_The Eskimo._--It is a very easy matter for an artistic ethnologist to
make some fine light-and-shade contrasts between two populations, where
he has an Iroquois or a Sioux at one end, and an Eskimo of Labrador at
the other. An oblique eye, bleared and sore from the glare of the snow,
with a crescentic fold overshadowing the _caruncula lacrymalis_,
surmounted by a low forehead and black shaggy locks, with cheek-bones of
such inordinate development as to make the face as broad as it is long,
are elements of ugliness which catch the imagination, and produce a
caricature, where we want a picture. And they are elements of ugliness
which can be accumulated. We may add to them, a nose so flat, and cheeks
so fleshy, as for a ruler, placed across the latter, to leave the former
untouched. We may then notice the state of the teeth, from the
mastication of injurious substances; and having thus exhausted nature,
we may revert to the deformities of art. We may