FROM WHITE TO BLACK. 755 



made towards their conversion into another race. 

 Nor does he believe that the negro owes his colour 

 to a tropical sun, because those parts of the body 

 which are covered with us, are of the deepest 

 black. But he forgets that in Africa, the natives 

 generally go naked, or nearly so, as among all 

 barbarous tribes in warm climates. 



In opposition to the foregoing views, we are 

 informed by Herder, on the authority of several 

 highly respectable travellers in Africa, that the 

 descendants of the Portuguese who settled on the 

 coast of Guinea about three hundred and fifty 

 years ago, are nearly as black as the natives ; 

 while in symmetry of form, regularity of features, 

 and general intelligence, they have degenerated 

 in the same proportion. (Philosophy of Hist. vol. 

 i. p. 267). 



If, then, there has been so great an approxi- 

 mation of Europeans to the colour and other 

 peculiarities of the negro race in three hundred 

 and fifty years, what changes might naturally be 

 expected to arise in the course of two or three 

 thousand years? Does this not look as if the 

 white might be transformed gradually into the 

 black race? In support of this opinion, Bruce 

 states, that the Jews are black in Abyssinia, 

 brown in Arabia, Syria, and Egypt, while it is 

 certain that they are much darker in Italy, Spain, 

 Portugal, Greece, and Turkey, than in Britain, 

 France, Holland, Germany, Sweden, and Russia, 



