88 VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 



The Negroes have little invention, but strong powders of imitationj so that 

 they readily acquire the mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and 

 all their external senses are remarkably acute. 



With respect to their intellectual character there is much diversity of opinion; 

 some authors estimate it at a very low scale, w^hilst others insist that the germ of 

 mind is as susceptible of cultivation in the Negro as in the Caucasian. That 

 there is considerable difference in this respect in the different tribes is pretty 

 generally admitted; but, up to the present time, the advantages of education have 

 been inadequately bestow^ed on them, and instances of superior mental pov^ers 

 have been of extremely rare occurrence. 



Note. — The great antiquity of the Negro race admits of no question, and has even led some 

 philosophers to surmise that it was the primitive stock of mankind, and that all the other varieties 

 may have been derived from this one by the action of physical causes. A few facts are sometimes of 

 more weight than a host of hypotheses; and it may not be irrelevant to put this question, as well as 

 the converse of it, to a chronological test, in the words of a distinguished author. " According to 

 accredited dates," says he, " it is four thousand one hundred and seventy-nine years since Noah and 

 his family came out of the ark. They are believed to have been of the Caucasian race ; and the 

 correctness of the belief there is no ground to question. We shall assume it, therefore, as a truth, 

 without adducing the reasons which seem to sustain it. Three thousand four hundred and forty-five 

 years ago a nation of Ethiopians is known to have existed. Their skins, of course, were dark, and 

 they differed widely from Caucasians in many other particulars. They migrated from a remote 

 country and took up their residence in the neighborhood of Egypt. Supposing that people to have 

 been of the stock of Noah, the change must have been completed, and a new race formed, in seven 

 hundred and thirty-three years, and probably in a much shorter period.'^* 



The recent discoveries in Egypt give additional force to the preceding statement, inasmuch as 

 they show beyond all question, that the Caucasian and Negro races were as perfectly distinct in that 

 country upwards of three thousand years ago as they are now : whence it is evident that if the 

 Caucasian was derived from the Negro, or the Negro from the Caucasian, by the action of external 

 causes, the change must have been effected in at most a thousand years ; a theory which the 

 subsequent evidence of thirty centuries proves to be a physical impossibility; and we have already 

 ventured to insist that such a commutation could be effected by nothing short of a miracle. 



18. THE CAFFRO-AFRICAN FAMILY. 



The country of the CajGfers, now called Caffraria, is of indeterminate extent. 

 On the eastern coast it extends from the Keiskamna river (w^hich separates it from 

 the Cape colony) to the south of Delagoa bay. On the west it touches Orange 



* Caldwell, Thoughts on the Unity of the Human Species, p. 72. Philad, 1830. 



