179,180), who ply their avocations every day in the streets of Mobile;
where anybody could in a single morning collect a hundred others
quite as strongly marked. Fig. 179 (whose portrait was caught when,
chuckling with delight, he was “ shelling out corn’ to a favorite hog)
may he considered caricatured, although one need not travel far to
procure, in daguerreotype, features fully as animal ; hut Fig. 180 is a
fair average sample of ordinary field-Negroes in the United States..
Mr. Lyell, in common with tourists less eminent, hut in this question
not less misinformed, has somewhere stated, that the Negroes in
America are undergoing a manifest improvement m their physical
type. He has no doubt that they will, in time, show a development
in skull and intellect quite equal to the whites.^ This unscientific
assertion is disproved by the cranial measurements of Dr. Morton.
That Negroes imported into, or born in, the United States become
more intelligent and better developed in their physique generally than
their native compatriots of Africa, every one will admit ; but such intelligence
is easily explained by their ceaseless contact with the whites,
from whom they derive much instruction ; and such physical improvement
may also be readily accounted for by the increased comforts
with which they are supplied. In Africa, owing to their natural improvidence,
the Negroes are, more frequently than not, a half-starved,
and therefore half-developed race ; but when they are regularly and
adequately fed, they become healthier, better developed, and more
humanized. Wild horses, cattle, asses, and other brutes, are greatly
improved in like manner by domestication : but neither climate nor
food can transmute an ass into a horse, or a buffalo into an ox.
One or two generations of domestic culture effect all the improvement
of which Negro-organism is susceptible. We possess thousands
of the second, and many more of Negro families of the eighth or tenth
generation, in the United States ; and (where unadulterated by white
blood) they are identical in physical and in intellectual characters.
Ho one in this country pretends to distinguish the native son of a
Negro from his great-grandchild (except through occasional and ever-
apparent admixture of white or Indian blood) ; while it requires the
keen and experienced eye of such a comparative anatomist as Agassiz
to detect structural peculiarities in our few African-born slaves.
The “ improvements” among Americanized Negroes noticed by Mr.
Lyell, in his progress from South to North, are solely due to those
ultra-ecclesiastical amalgamations which, in their illegitimate consequences,
have deteriorated the white element in direct proportion that
they are said to have improved the black.
But, leaving aside modern quibbles upon simple facts in nature, (so
often distorted through philanthropical panderings to political ambition),
we select, from Abrahamic antiquity, two other heads (Figs.
181, 182) which, although not Negroes, constitute an interesting link
in the gradation of races; being placed, geographically and physically,
This specimen (Fig. 181) is from
the “ Grand Procession ” of Thot-
mes IH.—XYHth dynasty, about
the sixteenth century b . c. The
original leads a leopard and carries
ebony-wood: and his skin is
ash-colored in Bosellini.328 The
same scene is given in Hoskins’s
Ethiopia, where this man’s person
is improperly painted red.™ He is
again figured without colors by
between the two extremes.
F ia . 181.
Wilkinson,330 no less than by Champollion-Figeac.331 He is another
sample of those “gentes subfusci coloris ’’—abounding around Ethiopia,
above Egypt — neither Negro, Berberri, nor Abyssinian; but of a
race affiliated probably to the latter; judging, that is, by characteristics
alone, in the absence of hieroglyphical explanations now effaced by time.
Here we behold (Fig. 182), un-
F ig . 182. doubtedly, a true Abyssinian, who
should be represented, as he is at
Thebes, o ra n g e -co lo rWe have
the valid authority of Pickering333»
on this point; who concludes his
chapter on Abyssinians' as follows
: —
“ It seems, however, that the true Abyssinian
(as first pointed out to me by Mr.
Gliddon) has been separately and distinctly
figured on the Egyptian monuments: in the
two men leading the camelopard in the tribute
procession of Thoutmosis III.; and this
opinion was confirmed by an examination of the original painting at Thebes.”
Pickering’s Races of Men contains a beautiful eircnamon-colored
portrait of an Abyssinian warrior, taken by Prisse; and, as before
remarked, offers to the reader a good idea of the living type of this
people.
It is worthy, too, of special note, that the above Fig. 182 is represented,
in the Theban procession, leading a giraffe / which animal is
not met with nearer to Egypt than Dongola; a fact that fixes his
parallel of latitude along the Abyssinian regions of the Nile. Such
heads seem to confirm the fidelity of Egyptian draughtsmen, together
with the correctness of their ethnographical conceptions and varied