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to take their game in the forest, or to draw the fish from the stream. In this rude condition they would be abandoned entirely to the unassisted efforts of nature, to be formed by the influences of a new climate, and by the wants, and the dangers of their new situation. In the milder and more fertile regions of the southern continent, which had derived their population, through several intermediate grades, from the more cultivated nations in the South of Asia, some advances towards improvement, and a civilized state of society, had been made. but these elementary operations in the arts had not yet extended to the tribes which lay above the thirtieth degree of northern latitude when the first adventurers from Europe reached the American shores. These still remained in the rudest condition of human nature. They were universally savage; but they were savages of a temperate climate, and, therefore, not so utterly degenerate as those which are found under the latitudes of extreme heat, or extreme cold. The powers of life were not benumbed by the one, nor enfeebled by the other. A warm sun, and a luxuriant vegetation did not offer to the natural indolence of a savage the means of subsistence without the strenuous exertion of his own facilities; nor did 

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the rigors of a frozen sky render those exertions entirely fruitless. The indian of North-America presents to us man completely savage, but obliged by the nature of the forest which he inhabits, and the variable temperature of the heaven under which he lives, as well as by the enemies with which he is surrounded, to employ both courage and address, for his subsistence, and defence. He is of savages, therefore, the most noble, in whom the unaided powers of human nature appear with greater dignity than among those rude tribes who either approach nearer to the equator, or are farther removed towards the poles.
  It is not my object, at present, to pourtray the moral character of the American savage in all its relations; I shall contemplate it singly in his military operations and atchievements, as this is the principal point of view in which it is immediately related to my subject*; and is that, indeed, in which the

* This appendix is extracted from a larger dissertation entitled the history and philosophy of the manners of the American savage, which I have had it in contemplation to prepare as an addition to my lectures on Moral Philosophy in the college designed to exhibit the influence of various states of society on the human character.