history decline and pass away. The mysterious obscurity which hangs over this people, and is every day burying them deeper and deeper in oblivion, tends to increase the superstition and magnify the wonder. Yet there is no need of any mistake upon this subject. A little attention to the history of the first settlements in America, will show that the Indians neither had, nor pretended to have, any such medical knowledge. If they had used any rational means for the recovery of their sick, or possessed any such skill, the sharp-sighted settlers would not have been slow to learn or put them in practice. The first Europeans who came to America found the vast wilderness inhabited by a race of red men, who, in their personal appearance, and in their social and domestic habits, were different from all other men. They were in a perfectly savage state, and appeared never to have had intercourse with any other race of men. They had no knowledge of anything except what pertained to the art of war, or the means of subsistence. Confined by no local attachments, their numerous tribes migrated hither and thither as their necessities or
