16 NEGRO INTELLIGENCE. [CHAP. XX. 



Which may be thus interpreted : Make him good as his doc 

 trine, make his doctrine as pure as his life, and may both be in 

 the likeness of his God. 



This anecdote reminds me of another proof of negro intelli 

 gence, related to me by Dr. Le Conte, whose black carpenter 

 came to him one day, to relate to him, with great delisrht, a grand 

 discovery he had made, namely, that each side of a hexagon was 

 equal to the radius of a circle drawn about it. When informed 

 that this property of a hexagon had long been known, he re 

 marked that if it had been taught him, it would have been prac 

 tically of great use to him in his business. 



There had been &quot; a revival&quot; in Savannah a short time before 

 my return, conducted by the Methodists, in the course of which 

 a negro girl had been so much excited, as to be thrown into a 

 trance. The physician who attended her gave me a curious de 

 scription of the case. If the nerves of only one or two victims 

 are thus overwrought, it is surely more than questionable whether 

 the evil does not counterbalance all the good done, by what is 

 called &quot;the awakening&quot; of the indifferent. 



I inquired one day, when conversing with some of the citizens 

 here, whether, as New York is called the Empire State, Penn 

 sylvania the Keystone State, Massachusetts the Bay State, and 

 Vermont, when the question of its separation from New Hamp 

 shire was long under discussion, &quot; the Future State,&quot; in short, as 

 almost all had some name, had they any designation for Georgia ? 

 It ought, they said, to be styled the Pendulum state, for the 

 Whigs and Democrats get alternately possession of power ; so 

 that each governor is of opposite politics to his predecessor. The 

 metropolis, they added, imitates the example of the State, elect 

 ing the mayor and aldermen of Savannah one year from the Dem 

 ocratic and the next from the Whig party. It has been of late 

 a great point, in electioneering tactics, to secure the votes of fifty 

 or sixty Irish laborers, who might turn the scale here, as they 

 have so often done in New York, in the choice of city officers. 

 In the larger city they were conciliated for some years by em 

 ployment in the Croton waterworks, so that &quot; pipe-laying&quot; be 

 came the slang term for this kind of bribery ; here, it ought to 



