tact with Spaniards
and Englishmen--populations whose civilization differs from their own;
and populations who are evidently intrusive and of recent origin.
Precisely the same would be the case, if the Nicaraguans were made
Mexican. The civilization would be of another sort; the population which
introduced it would be equally intrusive; and the only difference would
be a difference of stage and degree--a little earlier in the way of
time, and a little less contrast in the way of skill and industry.

But the evidence in favour of the Mexican origin of the Nicaraguans, is
doubtful; and so is the fact of their having wholly lost their native
tongue; and until one of these two opinions be proved, it will be well
to suspend our judgment as to the isolation of the Moskitos. If, indeed,
either of them be true, their ethnological position will be a difficult
question. With nothing in Honduras to compare them with--with nothing
tangible, or with an apparently incompatible affinity in Nicaragua--with
only very general miscellaneous affinities in Guatemala--their
ethnological affinities are as peculiar as their political
constitution. Nevertheless, isolated as their language is, it has
undoubted _general affinities with those of America at large_; and this
is all that it is safe to say at present. But it is safe to say _this_.
We have plenty of data for their tongue, in a grammar of Mr.
Henderson's, published at New York, 1846.

The chief fact in the history of the Moskitos, is that they were never
subject to the Spaniards. Each continent affords a specimen of this
isolated freedom--the independence of some exceptional and impracticable
tribes, as compared with the universal empire of some encroaching
European power. The Circassians in Caucasus, the Tshuktshi Koriaks in
North-eastern Asia, and the Kaffres in Africa, show this. Their
relations with the buccaneers were, probably, of an amicable
description. So they were with the Negroes--maroon and imported. And
this, perhaps, has determined their _differentiae_. They are
intertropical American aborigines, who have become partially European,
without becoming Spanish.

Their physical conformation is that of the South rather than the North
American; and, here it must be remembered, that we are passing from one
moiety of the new hemisphere to the other. With a skin which is
olive-coloured rather than red, they have small limbs and undersized
frames; whilst their habits are, _mutatis