always, and do we not everywhere, set apart a sacerdotal order who may mediate for us?"

[No.]

The author says that only a copper-coloured race can exist permanently in America :

"The white people of America are dying for want of flesh and blood. They have bone and sinew, but they are dry and shriveled for lack of the healthy juices of life. The author has often sadly marked the contrast to be observed in social or intellectual gatherings of the negro and the white American. In the latter are seen unmistakably, the indications of physical decay. The cheeks are shrunken, the lips are thin and bloodless, the under jaw narrow and retreating, the teeth decayed and painful, the nose sharp and cold, the eyes small and watery, the complexion of a blue and yellow hue, the head and shoulders bent forward, the hair dry and straggling upon the men, the waists of the women thin and pinched, telling of sterility and consumption, the general appearance gaunt and cadaverous from head to foot. You will see bald heads upon young men. You will see eye-glasses and spectacles, false teeth, artificial colour in the face, artificial plumpness to the form. The intercourse will be formal, ascetic, unemotional. You will see these characteristics so universal that they become rather the rule than the exception. Where the cheeks on one grown person will be rounded and tinted with the healthy blood, ten persons will have them pale and hollow. Turn now to an assemblage of negroes. Every cheek is plump; the teeth are whiter than ivory; there are no bald heads, the eyes are large and bright, the head and shoulders are always up and back, every face wears a smile, every form is stalwart. The white man is going to seed; the black man is adding vigour and freshness to the trunk. The white child is born with full cheeks, but as he approaches manhood they fall away and are lank and thin. Nature did not intend that men's cheeks should be hollow. The dentists' signs in every locality only tell feebly of the sickness and racking pain that accompanies this weak and diseased condition of the jaws. Our professional men show more than any the lack of healthful association with their opposites of the other sex. They become thin, and gaunt, and old, when they should be strong and vigorous. They are told they need exercise; they take long walks in the morning air, and come back more cold and shriveled than ever. They need contact with healthy, loving, warm-blooded natures to fill up the lean interstices of their anatomy."

Certainly this work gives us some new ideas, for we have been taught that the dark races have originated nothing, but this author says, "The white race has originated nothing"! The cause of the recent disturbances in New York, we suppose, was jealousy of the Irishman to the Negro, for we here read: "The white Irish woman loves the black man, and in the old country it has been stated, that

the Negro is sure of the handsomest amongst the poor white females"!

Professor Huxley has recently declared that the "slave-holding interest" indulges in far greater absurdities than the abolitionists; but we confess we have never read any statement respecting the physical characters of the races of man which for absurdity equals the following:

"The fusion, whenever it takes place, will be of infinite service to the Irish. They are a more brutal race and lower in civilisation than the negro. The latter is mild, spiritual, fond of melody and song, warm in his attachments, fervid in his passions, but inoffensive and kind, and only apparently brutal when his warmest emotions are brought into play in his love for the white woman. The Irish are coarse-grained, revengeful, unintellectual, with very few of the finer instincts of humanity. Of course we speak of the labouring Irish as they appear in this country. The Milesian is a child of the sun. He was originally of a coloured race, and has all the fervid emotional power which belongs to a people born in or near the tropics. His long habitation north, however, and the ignorance in which he has been kept by misgovernment, have sunk the Irishman below the level of the most degraded negro. Take an equal number of negroes and Irish from among the lowest communities of the city of New York, and the former will be found far superior to the latter in cleanliness, education, moral feelings, beauty of form and feature, and natural sense. One of the evidences of degeneracy which have been pointed out in certain of the negro races has been the prognathous skull, the projecting mouth, the flat and open nostril. Yet this is a characteristic as true of certain portions of the people of Ireland as of the Guinea African. The inhabitants of Sligo and Mayo, portions of Ireland under peculiarly bad government, have developed these precise types of features. The people have become thin-legged, potbellied, with mouth projected, head sloped, nostril distended; in short, they exhibit all the characteristics by which we have marked the lowest type of the negro. The blending of the Irish in this country with the negro will be a positive gain to the former. With education and an intermingling with the superior black, the Irish may be lifted up to something like the dignity of their ancestors, the Milesians. The poets who sang of the ancient Irish, of the wisdom of their rulers, of their bards and warriors, forgot, perhaps, that this noble old race was of a very dark complexion, and native of the far south. The red hair and beard so common in Ireland is a sure indication of the southern origin of its people. When a very dark people move to a northern climate the physiological change effected by the temperature is to convert the black into red hair."

A chapter, entitled, "Heart-Histories of the White Daughters of the South," is too indecent for us to quote from; we believe that only a Mulatto or a Mulatress could have strung together such licen

tious absurdities. We think we have said enough to show the quality of this work. It is painful to read, and more painful to reflect, on the injury it may do to a people who are influenced by its teachings.

That this question has also its comical aspect, may be seen in the subjoined extract, which we beg our readers to compare with Mr. Blake's edition of Broca's Human Hybridity, p. 28, and reconcile as best they can:—

"MISCEGENATION.-The New Hampshire Patriot gives facts to show that the female abolitionists who went as teachers of the Negroes at Port Royal, have been very successful in at least one branch of juvenile development. It says: Private advices from Port Royal say that many of the female abolitionists who went to Port Royal to teach the little niggers how to read and pray, have been obliged, within the past few months, to abandon their black charges and open nurseries on their own private account. An officer informed us recently that no less than sixty-four spinsters had contributed to the population in and about the neighbourhood of Port Royal harbour. The climate seems to favour population even more than the production of Sea Island cotton by paid Negro labour. The information furnished us by the officer concerning the sixty-four little Mulattoes has been confirmed by the testimony of the Rev. Liberty Billings, Lieutenant-Colonel of the First South Carolina regiment, who is here in consequence of ill health. He says it is a sad truth.'"

ANTHROPOLOGY IN ITS CONNECTION WITH
CHEMISTRY.*

To Dr. William Herapath belongs the honour of suggesting to the public mind a difficulty in connection with the Hebrew account of man's origin, which had, we believe, not been noticed before. We can hardly realise the fact, that it was necessary to address a body of educated medical men in such terms, and we are still more astonished to think that such language could have brought on the speaker marks of disapprobation. We shall leave chemists and medical men to settle this matter as best they can, we simply chronicle the following objectionable passage delivered to the medical faculty assembled in congress at Bristol in the year 1863.

From our days of boyhood it has been most assiduously taught

* Address on Chemistry in its relations to Medicine and its Collateral Sciences, By W. Bird Herapath, M.D. Bristol, 1863.

us that man was made out of the dust of the earth,' and 'as of dust thou art so to dust thou shalt return.' Now this opinion, if literally true, would necessitate the existence of alumina as one of the elements of organised structure, for no soil or earthy material capable of being employed by agriculturists can be found without alumina existing largely in its constitution, and clay cannot be found without it; therefore chemistry as loudly protests against accepting the Mosaic record in a strictly literal sense as geology, geography, astronomy, or any other of the physical sciences so absurdly dogmatised upon weekly from the pulpits, by those who have neglected the study of true science, but still profess to teach us that which is beyond all knowledge. "That man is not made out of the dust of the earth, but from organised material or vegetable matter properly digested and assimilated by other organised beings, chemical science everywhere proves to us incontestably, and the existence of no element in the composition of the human body, which does not also occur in the bodies of the mammalia and all the other classes into which the animal kingdom has been divided by natural historians, tends to prove by the chemical method the truth of that proposition which has been advanced by comparative anatomy:-That man is one with the beasts of the field; whilst physiological psychology demonstrates that if man have a reasoning principle independent of its material envelope, and so far spiritual in its character as to be 'immaterial' in its principle, so the beasts which perish' must have mental powers of perception, sensation, thought, feelings, and emotions dependent upon some immaterial principle in like manner, or that we are in fact compelled to admit that thought is one of the many properties with which matter has been invested by the Beneficent Creator and Architect of the Universe.

"This spiritual principle of the whole animal kingdom has hitherto eluded the skill of the chemist as it has equally baffled the research of the anatomist; but in the same way that chemical logic will enable the chemist to demonstrate satisfactorily the existence of a material elementary principle, even before its isolation and production in the test-tube, so analogical reasoning proves the possibility and probability of such a spiritual principle as one of Nature's powers; for the same reason that chemistry has failed to detect and demonstrate the existence of this spiritual principle, whose proper domains are the realms of thought and the sphere of perception, so it has hitherto been unable to render any assistance to the elucidation of the diseases and derangements of the mental powers, dependent as they are upon the combined agency of spirit and matter. The true corporeal structure, so intimately connected with the phenomena of mind, may be, and has been, subjected to numerous investigations, by both the anatomist and the chemist, and even further submitted to microscopical analysis and investigation, without as yet giving any satisfactory evidences of change during many of those diseased conditions, which, also! too often afflict humanity."

123

SAVAGE AFRICA.*

SOME three years ago, when that amiable traveller, M. Du Chaillu, was astonishing the London public with his wonderful adventures amongst the gorillas and the Fans of Equatorial Africa, a "young man about town" formed the Englishman-like resolution of visiting these scenes, and endeavour to reconcile the somewhat conflicting statements given by the "gorilla hunter." Before us, we have a goodly volume of some 587 pages as the result of this resolution. We, however, search in vain for any explanation of M. Du Chaillu's contradictions, as the subject is never once mentioned in the body of the work. In a note, however, we are told that the author is able to explain all M. Du Chaillu's contradictions, if he ever should be called on to do so. So far we find no fault, and we are glad that Mr. Reade has said nothing to wound the feelings of that brave traveller and explorer who was made by his injudicious friends, for their own glory, the lion of the season for 1861.

It is necessary to bear in mind Mr. Reade's object in visiting Africa. The fact is that his mission was to discover the truth; and, therefore, his testimony on any subject would consequently probably be of some considerable value. And here we think the author has made a name for himself, as one who has fearlessly spoken the truth respecting what he saw and heard. Nor is the work merely a reprint of the journal of a self-sufficient traveller: but Mr. Reade has exhibited no little literary skill in the composition of the volume before us.

We think, however, that the book would be greatly improved by the reduction of the number of chapters, and also of the sections of his subject. The work is divided into no less than thirty-eight chapters; at least one half too many. The author shows himself acquainted with what has been written upon the subject, and, indeed, occasionally we could wish he had not been so well acquainted with it; for we seem to recognise in more than one place anecdotes of former travellers. These, no doubt, add to the interest of the work; but they destroy the value of the volume as a book of original ob

servation.

* Savage Africa: being the Narrative of a Tour in Equatorial, South-Western, and North-Western Africa; with notes on the Habits of the Gorilla; on the Existence of Unicorns and Tailed Men; on the Slave Trade; on the Origin, Character, and Capabilities of the Negro, and on the Future Civilisation of Western Africa. By W. Winwood Reade, F.A.S.L., etc. With Illustrations and a Map. Second Edition. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1864.