undeluged earth;" while they accomplished, as fully as any other descendants of Noah, the appointed repeopling, and were fruitful and increased, and brought forth abundantly in the earth, and multiplied therein, even as did the most favoured among the sons of Shem or Japhet. When some five centuries after the Canaanite had entered on his strangely burdened heritage, the progenitor of its later and more favoured inheritors was guaranteed by a divinely executed covenant, the gift to his seed of that whole land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the covenant was not even then to take place until the fourth generation, because the iniquity of the Amorites—one of the generations of Canaan, used by synecdoche for the whole-was not yet full. When that appointed period had elapsed, and only the narrow waters of the Jordan lay between the sons of Israel and the land of the Canaanites, their leader and lawgiver, who had guided them to the very threshold of that inheritance on which only his eyes were permitted to rest, foretold them in his final blessing: "The eternal God shall thrust out the enemy from before thee, and shall destroy, and Israel shall dwell in safety alone." No commandment can be more explicit than that which required of the Israelites the utter extirpation of the elder occupants of their inheritance: "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land, and hath cast out before thee seven nations greater and mightier than thou, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them." Nevertheless we find that the Israelites put the Canaanites to tribute, and did not drive them out; that the children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites; but, according to the author of the book of Judges, they still dwelt there in his day; and so with various others of the aboriginal tribes. So also, the Gibeonites obtained by craft a league of amity with Israel, and they also remained-bondmen, hewers of wood, and drawers of water, yet so guarded by the sacredness of the oath they had extorted from their disinheritors, that at a long subsequent date we find seven of the race of their supplanters, the sons and grandsons of the first Israelitish king, sacrificed by David to their demand for vengeance on him who had then attempted their extirpation. Even more remarkably significant than all those evidences of a large remnant of the ancient Hamitic population, surviving in the midst of the later Semitic inheritors of Canaan, is the appearance of the name of Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, in the genealogy of Joseph, as recorded by Mathew. The purity of descent of the promised seed of Abraham and David was most sacredly guarded through all the generations of their race, yet even in that line a singularly remarkable exception is admitted; and the son of Ham, and the seed of Canaan, have also their links in the genealogy of the Messiah. Turning to another portion of the same subject, we trace in the Noahic genealogies the primitive occupants of ancient Phoenicia among the descendants of Ham, while, looking to other and independent sources of evidence pertaining to the people of historical Phoenicia, we find them a race philologically Semitic, but in so far as their mythology and legislation, and those of their Carthaginian offshoots, supply data, we should class them as a race psycologically Hamitic. The legitimate inference would seem to be, that in Phoenicia, as in Palestine, the Semitic and Hamitic races were brought together by the extension of the former over the area primarily occupied by the latter; and that then, unrestrained by any of the checks which so materially circumscribed the tendency to intermixture between the conquerors and the conquered, in the inheritance of the Hebrews, a complete amalgamation took place, though with such predominancy of the later intruded Semitic conquerors, as history supplies abundant illustrations of in the well-detailed pages of more recent national annals. From all this it would seem to be justly inferred that ethnological displacement and extinction must be regarded in many, probably in the majority of cases, not as amounting to a literal extirpation, but only as equivalent to absorption. Such doubtless has been the case to a great extent with the ancient European Celta, notwithstanding the definite, the distinct historical evidence we possess of the utter extinction of whole tribes both of the Britons and Gauls, by the merciless sword of the intruding Roman; and such also is being the case with no inconsiderable remnant of the aboriginal Red Indians of this continent. Partially so it is the case even with the Negro population of the United States, in spite of all the prejudices of cast or colour. It is impossible to travel in the far West of this American continent on the borders of the Indian territories, or to visit the reserves where the remnants of the Indian tribes displaced by us in Canada and the States, linger on in passive process of extinction, without perceiving that they are disappearing as a race, in part at least by the same process by which the German, the Swede, or the Frenchman, on emigrating into the Anglo-saxonised States of America, becomes in a generation or two amalgamated with the general stock. I was particularly impressed with this idea during a brief residence at the Sault Ste. Marie this summer (1855). When on my way to Lake Superior, I had passed a large body of Christianised Indians, assem bling from various points both of the American and the Hudson's Bay territories, on one of the large islands in the River Ste. Marie, and while waiting at the Sault a considerable body of them returned, passing up in their canoes. Having entered into conversation with an intelligent American Methodist missionary, who accompanied them, I questioned him as to the amount of intermarriage or intercourse that took place between the Indians and the whites, and its probable effects in producing a permanent new type resulting from the mixture of the two very dissimilar races. His reply was: "Look about you at this moment, comparatively few of these onlookers have not Indian blood in their veins ;" and such I discovered to be the case, as my eye grew more familiar with the traces of Indian blood. At all the white settlements near those of the Indians, the evidence of admixture was abundant, from the pure half-breed to the slightly marked remoter descendant of Indian maternity, discoverable only by the straight black hair, and a singular watery glaze in the eye, not unlike that of the English Gypsey. The Indian may remain uncivilized, and perish before the advance of civilization, which brings for him only vice, famine, and disease, in its train; but such is not the case with the mixed race of a white paternity. Much, perhaps all of their aptitude for civilization may come by their European heritage of blood, but the Indian element survives even when the all-predominating Anglo-Saxon vitality has effaced its physical manifestations. In this manner the ancient Celtic element of European ethnology doubtless still asserts no inconsiderable influence. The Briton of Wales retains nearly all his early characteristics; his philological and physiological peculiarities are alike unchanged. The Cornish Briton on the contrary retains only the last of these, his language having ceased to be a living tongue; while the continental Gaul has not only resigned his language for a neo-latin tongue, but he has so intermingled his blood with Roman, Frank, Norman, Iberian, and Arab, that he is no longer looked upon, like the Welshman or Irish Galwegian, as a pure Celt. Yet few, if any, doubt the predominance of the Celtic element, or hesitate to trace to that source, many of the characteristic peculiarities wherein the Frenchman differs so essentially either from the continental German or the Anglo-Saxon. In a like manner, though doubtless in a much less marked degree, it may be that the Red Indian of America may leave some permanent traces of his intermixture with that race by whom he is being displaced, proving here also that absorption, and not absolute extirpation, plays a part, at least, in the extinction of modern as well as primitive aboriginal races, when left to the operation of natural causes. ON SOME NEW SALTS OF CADMIUM AND THE IODIDES OF BARIUM AND STRONTIUM. BY HENRY CROFT, D.C.L. PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, TORONTO. Read before the Canadian Institute, January 12th, 1856. Von Hauer has lately taken up the examination of the double chlorides and bromides of cadmium, the existence of which was first noticed by me in 1842, in a preliminary paper read before the Chemical Society of London. The investigation being interrupted very shortly after its commencement by my removal to Toronto, had never been resumed, and in the short paper laid before the Chemical Society, the formulæ had not been fully established, with the exception of that of the sodium compound, viz., Cd Cl + Na Cl + 3 Aq, which has since been confirmed by Von Hauer. For the two cadmio-chlorides of potassium, the two cadmio-chlorides of ammonium, and the cadmio-bromide of potassium described by me in 1842, Von Hauer proposes the following formulæ : 2 K Cl + Cd Cl KCl+2 Cd Cl + HO 4 N H CI+ 2 Cd Cl + H O 2 N HCl + Cd Cl 2 K Br+ Cd Br Von Hauer endeavours to establish the existence of three classes of salts, which he denominates chloro-sesquicadmiates, chloro-monocadmiates, and chloro-bicadmiates, represented generally by the following formula: 2 R CI+ Cd Cl + X H OR CI+ Cd Cl + X HO, and R Cl + 2 Cd Cl + X HO; and in a second paper he states that he has succeeded in preparing a number of double salts with the chlorides of barium, strontium, calcium, magnesium, manganese, &c. &c., which seem to support this theory. The only examples of the monocadmiates as yet described are the sodium salt (1842) and Von Hauer's barium compound. Na Cl+Cd Cl + 3 Aq Ba Cl + Cd Cl + 4 Aq In my former paper I mentioned the existence of a double iodide of cadmium and potassium, for which in an anhydrous state I proposed the formula K I + Cd I. As this, if correct, would place the salt in the class of the iodo-monocadmiates, and as according to Von Hauer those compounds are difficult to obtain, at least with the chlorides, I have made a few experiments on the subject of the double iodides and bromides, the results of which are as follows: Cadmio-iodide of Potassium.-Iodide of cadmium and iodide of potassium were mixed in atomic proportions (equal equivalents) and evaporated over sulphuric acid,-the double salt being exceedingly soluble in water separated only when the solution was reduced to a very small bulk and the crystals formed were not very perfect. They were in the form of distorted octohedra, acquiring from the extension of certain faces a resemblance to a rhombic prism with dihedral terminations. The fact that they were octohedra was proved by measurements made by my colleague, Professor Chapman. 1.788 grammes dried between bibulous paper gave : Sulphate of potash......... 0·4603= 11.62 potassium. 1.771 grammes very carefully dried in bibulous paper and afterwards over sulphuric acid, gave : Water..... .0.876 = 4.94 Sulphide of cadmium .....0.3520 = 1546 cadmium. Iodide of silver ..... 2.2675 = 69.17 iodine. Sulphate of potash......... C•4183 4581.85 100.00 100.42 100.17 An analysis of the anhydrous salt made in 1:42 gave the following numbers, agreeing closely with the calculation : K Cal Cadmio-iodide of Sodium.-Iodide of Sodium was prepared by treating a solution of soda with excess of iodine, decomposing by sulphuretted hydrogen, warming, neutralizing with carbonate of soda and crystallizing. The crystals are as described by Mitscherlich, who gives the formula Na I + 4 H O, while Girand found a quantity of water, which would lead to the formula Na I + 5 HO. 2.108 dried in bibulous paper, lost on heating 0.4393 = 20·83. |