Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/625

Rh on the soft rug. This act seems to come from a reminiscence of an ancestral condition under which, having something less comfortable than a rug to lie upon, he had to make sure of a tolerably smooth couch by circling around it. Many and significant are the acts and promptings of human beings — ladies and gentlemen — which Darwin would tell us indicate reversionary tendencies in us.

Very much more might be suggested on this point; and if we should follow up the hint just dropped into details, it would open for us matter of curious interest. One fact bearing closely upon it may in the mention of it draw response from many of us. What healthful boy, born in city or country, has ever among us grown to manhood, and then lived in the toil and hurry and restraint of civilization, without feeling at some time the reversionary impulse or instinct towards barbarism in the form of a wild, free life, — of “camping out” (as it is called) in a tent in the woods or the meadow, or on the beach, or at least of making a fire in the woods? Year by year this impulse manifests itself among our young and healthful people, and even poor, wasted invalids are drawn by it to bivouacs in the Adirondack region. One or more generations of our ancestors in the Old World were born and nursed, and lived and were buried in the wilderness. Our first ancestors on this soil were compelled to conform themselves to a wilderness life, and some of its conditions passed down to their lineage. So we have reversionary instincts for it. Hardy and enterprising men there are who annually visit us from Europe (gentlemen, nobles), who, well aware what they must leave behind them, come here and seek the farthest wilds of the red men, in rocky fastnesses or in valleys amid dreary plains, and conform themselves to all the rough and repulsive and filthy conditions of life among the Indians, — in clothing, bed, and board, in the tramp, the hunt, the chase, the dreary winter desolation with the thermometer deep below zero. More frequently among us this