This collection is not only unique, as it concerns the particular people whose state and character it illustrates; but, as throwing light upon a grade and condition of the human race of which little has ever been known, it possesses an importance novel and unparticipated: for it has never happened, in the history of the world, that a savage people has been approached and depicted with this intelligent completeness. He who would learn what are the dispositions and the faculties which belong to the mind and heart of man, in the mere rudeness of his natural state, will find more satisfactory sources of information in this Indian gallery than in the fullest descriptions of travellers or the astutest schemes of metaphysicians.
_Catlin's Indian Gallery._--It is a remarkable circumstance, and one very characteristic of the energy of this age, that the same year and almost the same month should have witnessed the completion of three independent collections, each of which, after its way, gives us a complete portraiture of the nation to which it refers. What Mr. Dunn's figures have accomplished for China, and Mr. Wilkinson's drawings have done for Egypt, Mr. Catlin's paintings have performed for the Indian tribes. The first of these has excited the admiration of America, the second has won the applause of Europe; if the last is less brilliant than the one, it is more lively than the other, and it is not less complete than either. It is not merely a minute and thorough description of a nation whose situation and history render everything that relates to it in the highest degree curious and personal to Americans, but it addresses itself to the admiration and instruction of every philosophic mind as an encyclopædia picture of the savage state. While no histories present us with such copious information of the characteristics of those particular tribes, which are intimately and eternally connected with our annals, no speculative treatises contain anything like the knowledge here garnered of the qualities and attributes of that condition which is called the state of nature. The eye of childhood and the mind of age are alike astonished and informed by the spectacles here strikingly presented by this unrivalled work.