I have endeavoured to convey my impressions of their scenery, their vegetation, their animal productions, and their human inhabitants.

I have dwelt at some length on the varied and interesting problems they offer to the student of nature.
Before bidding my reader farewell, I wish to make a few observations on a subject of yet higher interest and deeper importance, which the contemplation of savage life has suggested, and on which I believe that the civilized can learn something from the savage man.
We most of us believe that we, the higher races have progressed and are progressing.

If so, there must be some state of perfection, some ultimate goal, which we may never reach, but to which all true progress must bring nearer.

What is this ideally perfect social state towards which mankind ever has been, and still is tending?
Our best thinkers maintain, that it is a state of individual freedom and self-government, rendered possible by the equal development and just balance of the intellectual, moral, and physical parts of our nature,--a state in which we shall each be so perfectly fitted for a social existence, by knowing what is right, and at the same time feeling an irresistible impulse to do what we know to be right., that all laws and all punishments shall be unnecessary.

In such a state every man would have a sufficiently well-balanced intellectual organization, to understand the moral law in all its details, and would require no other motive but the free impulses of his own nature to obey that law.
Now it is very remarkable, that among people in a very low stage of civilization, we find some approach to such a perfect social state.