Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/346

332 our remoter ancestors, and the matter which composed the body of our first human father still exists under another name.

When in sickness the body is emaciated, and the expression of the face in various ways is changed, you perceive unexpected resemblances to other members of the same family, as if within the same family there was a greater general similarity in the framework of the face than in its filling up and clothing.

Some have spoken slightingly of the Indians, as a race possessing so little skill and wit, so low in the scale of humanity, and so brutish that they hardly deserved to be remembered, using only the terms, miserable, wretched, pitiful, and the like. In writing their histories of this country, they have so hastily disposed of this refuse of humanity (as they might have called it), which littered and defiled the shore and the interior. But even the indigenous animals are inexhaustibly interesting to us. How much more then the indigenous men of America! If wild men, so much more like ourselves than they are unlike, have inhabited these shores before us, we wish to know particularly what manner of men they were, how they lived here, their relation to nature, their arts and their customs, their fancies and superstitions. They paddled over these waters, they wandered in