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light and heat of the sun; thick lips, full and prominent; mouths large, but cheerful and smiling; complexions dark, ruddy, and coppery; and the whole aspect displaying, as one of the most graphic delineators among modern travellers has observed, the genuine African character, of which the Negro is the exaggerated and extreme representation.' Blumenbach's examinations of the Egyptian mummies led him to the belief that there are three varieties in the physiognomy expressed in Egyptian paintings and sculptures. But one of these was the Ethiopian, which, he says, 'coincides with the descriptions given of the Egyptians by the ancients, and is chiefly distinguished by prominent jaws, turgid lips, a broad flat nose, and protruding eyeballs. Among the modern Copts,' says Prichard, many travellers have remarked a certain approximation to the Negro. Volney says that they have a yellowish, dusky complexion, resembling neither the Grecian nor Arabian; and adds, that they have a puffed visage, swollen eyes, flat nose, and thick lips, and bear much resemblance to mulattoes. Ledyard, whose testimony Prichard remarks is of the more value as he had no theory to support, says, 'I suspect the Copts to have been the origin of the Negro race: the nose and lips correspond with those of the Negro. The hair, wherever I can see it among the people here (the Copts), is curled, not like that of the Negroes, but like that of the mulattoes.'

But if the Egyptians and Copts exhibit the full, sensuous, and luxurious organization of the African, and properly belong to the African race, it certainly will not be difficult to establish the same claim for all the remaining dwellers on the continent. These were nearest to Asia and Europe, and felt most of foreign influences; and yet the type could not be changed; the round cheek, the full, protuberant eye, the dark hue, could not be converted into their contraries. Passing southward, into the burning heart of Africa, we find the tropical man in yet greater intensity and power. The races of Soudan display the fervid type of humanity fully formed, and in the highest degree. There are varieties in this great central region; the lowest being found on the Guinea coast, and the higher ones meeting the traveller as he rises those great terraces by which the continent lifts itself up from the sea. The Negroes of the Gold Coast, though dwelling amidst miasm and fever, and feeling only the very worst influences of European intercourse, are nevertheless characterised by Barbot as 'generally well-limbed and well-proportioned; having good oval faces, sparkling eyes, eyebrows lofty and thick; mouths not too large; clean, white, and well-arranged teeth; fresh red lips, not so thick and pendent as those of Angola, nor their noses so broad.' 'Among the Ashantee tribe of this same Guinea race,' says Bowditch, are to be seen, especially among the higher orders, not only the finest figures, but, in many instances, regular Grecian features, with brilliant eyes, set rather obliquely in the head.'

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Of the Senegambian nations, the Mandingoes are remarkable for their industry; and of all the inter-tropical races have shown the greatest energy of character. Their features are regular, their

character generous and open, and their manners gentle. Their hair is of the kind termed completely woolly. The Fulahs, another Senegambian people, forge iron and silver, and work skilfully in leather and wood, and fabricate cloth. An intelligent French traveller describes them as fine men, robust and courageous, understanding commerce, and travelling as far as to the Gulf of Guinea. The colour of their skin is a kind of reddish-black, their countenances are regular, and their hair longer and not so woolly as those of the common Negroes.

These statements may be overdrawn in some particulars, and further exploration is undoubtedly required in order to form a sure and completely satisfactory judgment respecting the tribes of Soudan. But, certainly, all the information thus far obtained goes to evince that this Negro-land is filled up with no puny populations, but with barbaric races of a powerful structure,--the bone and muscle out of which a Christian civilization shall hereafter form a powerful style of man.

Finally, threading our way downward, from the terraces to the southern-ward slope of the African continent, we find the Hottentot and Kafir, the most degraded of the African races, yet owing the excess of their degradation, by which they fall below the other African races, to the contact and influence of a corrupt European civilization. Unless a genuine Christian influence shall eventually be thrown in upon them by missions, by education, and by commerce, it was indeed, as one remarks, an ill-omened hour when a Christian navigator descried the Cape of Storms. The Hottentot, by war and vices, has, to a great extent, degenerated into the Bushman; but the Kafir still retains his aboriginal traits. Professor Lichtenstein describes them as follows: "They are tall, strong, and their limbs well proportioned; their colour is brown; their hair, black and woolly ; they have the high forehead and prominent nose of the Europeans, the thick lips of the Negroes, and the high cheek bones of the Hottentots.'

This rapid survey of the inhabitants of the continent, from north to south, justifies us, then, in attributing a common continental character to them all, and a continental character that is neither feeble nor emasculated; but, on the contrary, one that is muscular, arterial, and prodigal. There is a generical type of the African nature, constituted by the assemblage of certain physical and mental characteristics, which may be found all over the African continent, whereby this portion of the globe becomes as distinct and peculiar as Asia, or Europe, or America. And it is from this inter-tropical humanity that we are to deduce a ground of belief and confidence that Ethiopia will yet stretch out her hands to God, and that Africa is finally to acquire a place in the universal history of man on the globe.

The chief characteristic of the African nature is the union, in it, of recipiency with passion. The African is docile. He has nothing of the hard and self-asserting nature of the Goth. He is indisposed (like the dweller of the cold and stimulating zones) to stamp his own individuality upon others. On the contrary, his plastic, ductile, docile

nature receives influence from every side, gladly and genially. It is not probable that great empires will be built up on the African continent, that will extend their sway over other parts of the globe,—as the Persian sought to obtain rule in Europe, but was thwarted by Greece; or as the Roman extended his dominion over both Asia and Africa. The lust of empire will probably never run in African blood; for, foreign conquest requires a stern, self-reliant, indocile, ambitious nature, which would force itself upon other races and regions; and of this, the tropical man has little or nothing. It is rather to be expected that the African will confine himself to his own home, within the tropics, and will there take up, into his own rich and receptive nature, the great variety of elements and influences that will be furnished by other races and portions of the globe.

Under such circumstances, a unique and remarkable development of human nature must occur. A new form of national life will take rise. For this plastic character, this deep and absorbing receptivity, will be an alluvium, in which all seeds that are planted will strike a long root, and shoot up a luxuriant growth. National history, thus far, exhibits stimulant natures, and stimulant characteristics. The types of nationality that figure in the past have generally been moulded from this sort of material,-a species which has reached its height in the Anglo-Saxon. This quality is, indeed, a strong, intense, and grand one; and we are the last to disparage its worth. The triumphs of modern Christianity, and modern Civilization, are intimately connected with its powerful and persistent action in individuals and nations. But this tense and stimulant nature, characteristic of man in the Northern zone, has its deficiencies, also, like everything human. In isolation, and after long strain, it becomes wiry, hard, brittle, broken. It would not be well that it should be the sole type of humanity; or that no other elements than it can furnish should enter into the texture and fabric of national or individual life, from generation to generation. The Saxon himself, in order to his own preservation even, as well as his own best development, needs some infusion of equatorial elements. It would be well if his already over-wrought stimulancy could be somewhat tranquillized and enriched by the languor and sluggishness of the tropics. It would be well if the hollow features of the Anglo-American could assume somewhat of the rounded fulness of the Sphinx's or the Memnon's face; if his eager and too shallow eye could be made bulbous and deep, like that of Soudan.

This, then, is the groundwork of the coming nationalities in Africa. It is a mild, docile, musing, and recipient nature, which is to drink in all the influences that shall pour forth from the old, and perhaps then declining civilizations of the other zones. It is the artist's nature, open at every pore, sensitive in every globule and cell of tissue, pulsing with a warm and somewhat slumbrous life,-a deep base for a high structure.

But this lethargic quality in the tropical man is allied with an opposite one. He is also a creature of passion. In the phrase of Mark Antony, there is a 'fire that quickens Nilus' slime.' Like his own

clime, the inhabitant of the tropics combines great antagonisms in his constitution. This slumber of his nature is readily stirred into wildest rage, as the heavy and curtained air of the equator, which has hung dense and still for days and weeks, is suddenly disparted by electric currents, and, in an instant, is one wide, livid blaze of lightning. This quality, like all counterbalancing ones, is not strictly contrary to the one that has just been described. Were it so, the one would neutralize and kill the other. There would be no interpenetration of the two, if nothing but the relation of sheer and mere contrariety, like that between fire and water, obtained between these two qualities in the African nature. It is antithesis, not contrariety. For this very passion itself originates in, and springs right out of, the lethargy. The nature has been slumbrous and dormant, only that it may, at the proper time, be fiery and active. The one balances, not neutralizes, the other. Were there an unintermittent draught and strain upon the entire man, there could never be this tropical vehemence. But the slumber is recuperative of the constitutional force; and, in and by the oscillations of passion and lethargy, the wondrous life goes on.

That the African is a passionate being, is attested by all history. No one can look at the features of the Memnon, without perceiving that beneath that placid contour there sleeps a world of passion. Shakespere has given Cleopatra to us in her own proud words

'I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.'

The influences of Christianity do not destroy, but refine and sanctify, this quality. The North-African church of the first centuries was full of divine fire. It flashes in the labouring, but powerful rhetoric of Tertullian. It glows like anthracite in the thoughts of Augustine, whose symbol in the church is a flaming heart; and over whose mighty and passionate sensualism the serene, spiritualizing, and Divine power of Christianity ultimately, and only after an elemental war within, like that of chaos, wrought an ethereal and saintly transformation that has not yet been paralleled in the history of the Church.

But we need not go into the distant past, or into the distant African continent, for evidence upon this point. We cannot look into the eye of the degraded black man who meets us in our daily walks, without perceiving that he belongs to the torrid zone. The eye, more than any other feature, is the index of the soul, and of the soul's life. That full, liquid, opaline orb, that looks out upon us from face and features that are stolid, or perhaps repulsive, testifies to the union of passion and lethargy in this fellow-creature. That large and throbbing ball, that sad and burning glance, though in a degraded and downtrodden man, betoken that he belongs to a passionate, a lyrical, and an eloquent race.

This tropical eye, when found in conjunction with Caucasian features, is indicative of a very remarkable organization. It shows that tremulous sensibilities are reposing upon a base of logic. No one

could fix his gaze, for a moment, upon that great Northern statesman who has so recently gone down to his grave, without perceiving that this rare combination was the physical substrate of what he was, and what he did. That deep-black iris, cinctured in a pearl-white sclerotic, and, more than all, that fervid torrid glance and gleam, were the exponents and expression of a tropical nature; while the thoroughbred Saxonism of all the rest of the physical structure indicated the calm and massive strength that underlay and supported all the passion and all the fire. It was the union of two great human types in a single personality. It was the whole torrid zone enclosed and upheld in the temperate.

It will be apparent from this analysis, if it be a correct one, that the African nature possesses a latent capacity fully equal, originally, to that of the Asiatic or the European. Shem and Japheth sprang from the very same loins with Ham. God made of one blood those three great races by which he re-populated the globe after the deluge. This blending of two such striking antitheses as energy and lethargy, the soul and the sense; this inlaying of a fine and fiery organization into drowsy flesh and blood; this supporting of a keen and irritable nerve by a tumid and strong muscular cord,-what finer combination than this is there among the varied types of mankind? The objection urged against the possibility of a historical progress in Africa, similar to that in the other continents, upon the ground that the original germ and basis was an inferior one,- -an objection that shows itself, if not theoretically, yet practically, in the form of inaction, and an absence of enthusiasm and enterprising feeling when the claims of Africa are spoken of, this objection is invalid. The philosophic and the philanthropic mind must, both alike, rise above the prejudices of an age, and look beyond a present and transient degradation, that has been the result of centuries of ignorance and slavery. If this be done, the philosopher sees no reason for refusing to apply the same law of progress and development (provided the external circumstances be favourable, and the necessary conditions exist) to the tropical man, that he does to the man of the temperate or the arctic zones; and no reason for doubting that, in the course of time, and under the genial influences of the Christian religion-the mother of us all-human nature will exhibit all its high traits and qualities in the black races, as well as in the white. And certainly the philanthropist, after a wide survey of history; after tracing back the modern Englishman to the naked Pict and bloody Saxon; after comparing the filthy savage of Wapping and St. Giles with the very same being and the very same blood in the drawing-rooms of Belgrave Square-has every reason for keeping up his courage and going forward with his work. There have been much stranger transformations in history than the rise of African republics, and African civilizations, and African literatures will be.

But how is the way to be prepared for this? From what point or points, and through what instrumentalities, is the alteration to commence? It is this second branch of the subject which we now proceed to briefly examine.

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