So were the Jolofs, handsome, black as jet, with features more regular than the Mandingoes, almost European, excepting the lips:  a nonchalant air, very warlike upon occasion, but not disposed to labor.  They have magistrates, and some forms for the administration of justice, but a civilization less developed than the Mandingo, in consequence of early contact with Christians.  It is said that the slave-traders taught them to lie and steal, and to sell each other, whenever they could not supply a sufficient number of their neighbors, the simple and pastoral Serreres.

The Foulahs live upon the elevated plateaus of Senegambia and around the sources of the Rio Grande.  The Mandingoes introduced the Koran among them.  French writers represent them as being capable of sustained labor; they cultivate carefully the millet, wheat, cotton, tobacco, and lentils, and have numerous herds.  Their mutton is famous, and their oxen are very fat.  The Foulahs are mild and affable, full of esprit, fond of hunting and music; they shun brandy, and like sweet drinks.  It is not difficult to govern them, as they unite good sense to quiet manners, and have an instinct for propriety.  Their horror of slavery is so great, that, if one of them is condemned to be sold, all the neighbors club together to pay his forfeit or purchase a ransom; so that few of them were found in the slave-ships, unless seized in the fields, or carried off from the villages by night.

They have mechanics who work in iron and silver, leather and wood; they build good houses, and live in them cleanly and respectable.  The Foulahs show, quite as decidedly as the Mandingoes, that great passions and interests have given to these parts of Africa a history and developed stocks of men.  When the Foulahs are compared with the wandering Felatahs, from whom they came, who speak the same language and wear the same external characters, it will be seen how Nature has yearned for her children in these unknown regions, and set herself, for their sakes, great stints of work, in that motherly ambition to bring them forward in the world.  Yes,—­thought the Guinea trader,—­these skilful Foulahs are Nature’s best gifts to man.

Their pure African origin is, however, still a contested point.  Many ethnologists are unwilling to attribute so much capacity to a native negro tribe.  D’Eichthal objects, that “a pretended negro people, pastoral, nomadic, warlike, propagating a religious faith, to say nothing of the difference in physical characteristics, offers an anomaly which nothing can explain.  It would force us to attribute to the black race, whether for good or for evil, acts and traits that are foreign to its nature.  To cite only one striking example, let me recall that Job Ben Salomon, the African, who in the last century was carried to America and thence to England, and was admired by all who knew him for the loftiness of his character, the energy of his religious fanaticism, and the extent of his intelligence,—­this Ben Salomon, who has been cited as a model of that which the negro race could produce, did not belong to that race; he was a Foulah."[F]