the most part American, and from fresh water;
and indicate how large a field for natural history inquiry the
vast continent of America still presents."

* * * * *

Mr. GEORGE CATLIN, the well-known American traveller, has brought
forward in London a plan for a _Museum of Mankind_, "to contain and
perpetuate the familiar looks, the manufactures, history, and records of
all the vanishing races of man." A report on the subject was read by him
at one of the scientific societies; and on the 9th of January he
delivered an address on the subject at his American-Indian Collection.
He opened by a general review of his past labors in the study of the
native tribes of America, illustrated by a reference to some of the
numerous records he has collected, and by the appearance of various
natives themselves in full costume. He then proceeded to enforce the
comprehensive scheme which now occupies him. After pointing out the
urgent necessity of at once engaging in the formation of a museum of the
kind proposed by him, if it is to be gathered together at all--for the
in-roads of civilization are rapidly extirpating the native races of the
world--he went on to develope his plan in its practical details. He
proposes, as the first step, the purchase and fitting-up of a steamer
"as a floating museum," in which the seaport towns of all countries
should be visited; considering that this mode of exhibition would
possess great advantages through "the facility of its visiting the chief
cities of the world, stopping no longer in any than a lucrative
excitement could be kept up;" and in the great immediate saving of time,
as well as in other respects. Mr. Catlin's present collection would form
the basis of such a museum. Mr. Catlin defines the word "mankind," for
his purpose, as meaning no more than the expiring members of the great
human family--the Red Indian, the native Australian, the Greenlander,
the Peruvian,--and so forth. Measures, no doubt, might be taken for
obtaining and preserving such memorials as exist of these and similar
races; and it is a reflection on the governments of England and of the
United States that they have hitherto remained so indifferent in the
matter,--that being severally custodians of certain interesting and
rapidly obliterating pages of the book of human history, they should
suffer the final extinction of the record to take place before their
eyes without any attempt to pr