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Show 192 BY PATH AND TRAIL. until but a mere remnant of the town builders and their singular structures now remains in the valley of the Eio Grande and the land of the Moqui. Bartlett and Hubert Bancroft, the historians, are of the opinion that, at one time, in the Salt Eiver country there was a population of 200,000 Indians Pimas, Maricopas and Papagoes of whom buf a pitiful remnant now remains. Of a certain ty, tribal wars and, it may be, famine and pestilence wore down the race and in a few years the white man's vices and the white man's diseases will finish them. Whether they would ever have advanced beyond their rude arbhi-tecture and simple hoe culture is very doubtful. I am of the opinion, from a study of and experience with the Brazilian tribes, that when the Europeans came to the southwest the indigenous people were descending from barbarism to savagery, and, like the Aztec tribes of Mexico, would, with the march of time, become cannibals. Savage man cannot of himself move upward. The negro x of equatorial Africa was a savage long before the time of Herodotus; for four thousand years he took not one single step toward civilization, and Livingstone and Stanley found him the same brutalized man that he was in the days of the first Eameses. St. Paul, two thou sand years ago, in language that admits of no equivoca tion, said that it was impossible for man to attain to a knowledge of the higher truths without a teacher. The low state of some of the American tribes, the South Sea islander, and the African savage, when first encountered by civilized man, would seem to prove that, unassisted by a higher type of the human race, the savage cannot ris& out of his degradation. And if even man, when having gone down to savagery, could never ascend the steep de cline he Ead once trodden, how was it possible for the |