QUINCY AND BRAINTREE. 451 



Africa different tribes with different degrees of intellec 

 tual endowment ; and that, to prove our case, we must 

 trace the same family always mixing with the same 

 blood for a couple of centuries, and show that the last 

 of the successive generations is wiser and nobler in mind 

 than the first. Though this has not been done, I am 

 not willing to estimate lightly the matured opinion of 

 so old and practised an observer as Dr Warren. 



March \^th. The ground was now free from snow, 

 and admitted of observations being made upon the nature 

 and capabilities of the surface. I spent this day, there 

 fore, in a visit to a Mr French, at Braintree, about a 

 dozen miles from Boston, along the Old Colony railroad. 



As far as Quincy, about seven miles, the road runs 

 over swamps and through hills of sand and slaty gravel. 

 Upon these latter rests the poor soil upon which the 

 early Bostonian settlers grew their Indian corn, as the red 

 men they displaced had grown it there before them. In 

 this township (Quincy) are the paternal seats of the 

 Quincys and the Adams, among the most illustrious of 

 the early names of the colony. These retain still the 

 first farms which were the early rural homes of their 

 respective families. 



Around the village of Quincy there is some better 

 land, but it becomes heavier and less sandy at Braintree. 

 Here, however, it is or has been loaded with numerous 

 boulders, often of large size, consisting chiefly of granite, 

 but mixed with occasional masses of metamorphic slate, 

 and of red sandstone conglomerate. The original cost 

 of this land to its owners may have been trifling ; but 

 nobody can say what it has cost to clear it of stones and 

 bring it into a condition in which the plough can make a 

 straight way through it. Mr French owns a farm of 

 200 acres ; and I walked over one or two fields, long 

 cleared of wood and kept in poor pasture, which he was 

 now clearing of stones with the view of adding to the 



