DIVERSITY OF RACES. 



and, though varying somewhat among themselves, yet all together 

 bearing a sufficient resemblance to distinguish them from every 

 race besides. Europe too appears proudly exhibiting its charac- 

 teristic species. And what is yet more striking, under similar 

 circumstances and the same climate in which is found every 

 variety of mankind, this continent alone affords the spectacle of 

 an aboriginal white man. 



Such are the physical diversities of races. But there is a still 

 more marked distinction appearing in their psychical characters ; 

 between which and the former, there is an obvious but strange 

 connection. One race seems as it were set aside by the hand of 

 Providence for a doom of the most dismal degradation. Another 

 appears sadly fated to grope ever in mere conceptions of wild 

 sports here and hunting grounds hereafter. A third, amid all 

 the elements of progress, is bound down under an immutable 

 conservatism. While yet another seems equally destined, and 

 rapidly speeding on, to the highest perfection of humanity. 

 Those lands of the Negro to which the dim light of Islam or 

 the rays of foreign culture have never penetrated, present the 

 gloomiest picture of man. It is there that he has arisen in no 

 sense above an instinctive existence. Without a letter or symbol 

 of language, barren and blank in intellect, aroused from habitual 

 stupor only by the clang of horrid dissonance, like the brute he. 

 lives, and seems like the brute to pass away. The American 

 Indians are a people of unique character, having many noble 

 traits, but wholly incapable of permanent civilization or improve- 

 ment. They seem to have been created merely to be the tenants 

 of an unoccupied territory, till in the fullness of time it should 

 become the home of a mightier race. That time has come, and 

 now before the white man they vanish like a breath of air, and 

 soon will be numbered only by their bleaching bones on our 

 plains. Wide over the continent of the orient dwells another 

 race, midway in the ascent of civilization. It is here that man, 

 with every incentive of a bountiful nature and of rich discover- 

 ies, as it were with the thread of his own destiny in his hands, 

 has plodded on for untold ages in the same profitless round. 

 Nations here have sprung up in a day, have swept like the storm- 



