430 THE NATURAL HISTORY REYIEW. 



African negro with that of the races of Europe. They have not even 

 reached the civilization of the other races of their own continent. 

 They have not only not reached that of the second-rate nations of 

 Asia, but they are even far below that of the third-rate civilization of 

 that continent, and even of its islands. Their agriculture is rudi- 

 mental and unskilful to the last degree, and their arts are confined 

 to the manufacture of a coarse pottery by the hand, to the weaving 

 of a very coarse fabric from cotton, and to the fabrication of malleable 

 iron. The elephant is more abundant in the country of the negroes 

 than in any other part of the world, yet they hunt it only for its 

 flesh and its tusks, and have never tamed and reduced it to ser- 

 vitude, as have done all the nations of Asia in whose country the 

 elephant is indigenous. Negro literature is an absolute blank. 

 No negro people have ever invented letters, symbolic or phonetic, 

 and rarely have negroes adopted the writing of other races. 



The negroes of Africa are eminently a home-keeping, unadven- 

 turous race. Neither war, commerce, nor colonization has ever 

 tempted them to transgress their native bounds. Unambitious and 

 unenterprising, they have, notwithstanding, become involuntary 

 colonists on a great scale. In America and its islands, which be- 

 fore knew no indigenous negro race, there now exist probably not 

 fewer than twelve millions of African negroes, a considerable num- 

 ber of whom are free, but the majority still in the same state of 

 slavery in which they were when first imported. "We have here, 

 then, a tolerably fair opportunity of observing them in a state of 

 servitude under stranger masters, in freedom under the same de- 

 scription of masters, and in a state of political independence, their 

 own masters. The comparison of the conditions of slavery and 

 freedom does by no means yield results as favourable as we could 

 have hoped. Increase of population is certainly no test of social 

 advancement or happiness, but it is at least a proof that material 

 wants are adequately provided for. The negroes in the United 

 States of America, where the experiment is seen on the largest 

 scale, are well fed, clothed, and housed, while even the intercourse 

 of the sexes is kept under some Avholesome restraint. They are 

 looked after, in fact, very much as a prudent and intelligent farmer 

 looks after his working and breeding cattle. The increase of num- 

 bers with them keeps pace very nearly with that of the free white 

 population, although the latter is aided by large immigration. The 

 emancipated negroes living among Europeans, still pursued by the 



