e. The plantigrade Cercoleptes has a long tail, and is entirely
arboreal. Of the edentates, the sloth can do nothing on the ground. The
gallinaceous birds, as the cigana and curassow--the pheasant and turkey
of the Amazon--perch on the trees, while the great number of arboreal
frogs and beetles is an additional proof of the adaptation of the fauna
to a forest region. Even the epiphytous plants sitting on the branches
suggest this arboreal feature in animal life.

CHAPTER XXII.

Life around the Great River.--Origin of the Red Man.--General
Characteristics of the Amazonian Indians.--Their Languages,
Costumes, and Habitations.--Principal Tribes.--Mixed
Breeds.--Brazilians and Brazil.

We come now to the genus Homo. Man makes a very insignificant figure in
the vast solitudes of the Amazon. Between Manaos and Para, the most
densely-peopled part of the valley, there is only one man to every four
square miles; and the native race takes a low place in the scale of
humanity. As the western continent is geologically more primitive than
the eastern, and as the brute creation is also inferior in rank, so the
American man, in point of progress, seems to stand in the rear of the
Old World races. Both the geology and zoology of the continent were
arrested in their development. Vegetable life alone has been favored.
"The aboriginal American (wrote Von Martius) is at once in the
incapacity of infancy and unpliancy of old age; he unites the opposite
poles of intellectual life."[179]

[Footnote 179: "I think I discover in the Americans (said Humboldt) the
descendants of a rare which, early separated from the rest of mankind,
has followed up for a series of years a peculiar road in the unfolding
of its intellectual faculties and its tendency toward civilization." The
South American Indian seems to have a natural aptitude for the arts of
civilized life not found in the red men of our continent.]

We will not touch the debatable ground of the red man's origin, nor
inquire whether he is the last remains of a people once high in
civilization. But we are tempted to express the full belief that
tropical America is not his "centre of creation." He is not the true
child of the tropics; and he lives as a stranger, far less fitted for
its climate than the Negro or Caucasian. Yet a little while, and the
race will be as extinct as the Dodo. He has not the supple organization
of the European, enabling him to accommodate