to the west of Cabo Blanco, and opposite Sicily, which lies in latitude 37 deg. 20’ 40” north, longitude 9 deg. 41’ east.  Its southernmost point is Cabo d’Agulhas, in 34 deg. 49’ 15” south; the distance between these two points being 4,330 geographical, or about 5,000 English miles.  The westernmost point is Cabo Verde, in longitude 17 deg. 33’ west; its easternmost, Cape Jerdaffun, in longitude 51 deg. 21’ east, latitude 10 deg. 25’ north, the distance between the two points being about the same as its length.  The western coasts are washed by the Atlantic, the northern by the Mediterranean, and the eastern by the Indian Ocean.  The shape of this “dark continent” is likened to a triangle or to an Oval.  It is rich in oils, ivory, gold, and precious timber.  It has beautiful lakes and mighty rivers, that are the insoluble problems of the present times.

Of the antiquity of the Negro there can be no doubt.  He is known as thoroughly to history as any of the other families of men.  He appears at the first dawn of history, and has continued down to the present time.  The scholarly Gliddon says, that “the hieroglyphical designation of ‘KeSH,’ exclusively applied to African races as distinct from the Egyptian, has been found by Lepsius as far back as the monuments of the sixth dynasty, 3000 B.C.  But the great influx of Negro and Mulatto races into Egypt as captives dated from the twelfth dynasty; when, about the twenty-second century, B.C., Pharaoh SESOUR-TASEN extended his conquests up the Nile far into Nigritia.  After the eighteenth dynasty the monuments come down to the third century, A.D., without one single instance in the Pharaonic or Ptolemaic periods that Negro labor was ever directed to any agricultural or utilitarian objects."[35] The Negro was found in great numbers with the Sukim, Thut, Lubin, and other African nations, who formed the strength of the army of the king of Egypt, Shishak, when he came against Rehoboam in the year 971 B.C.; and in his tomb, opened in 1849, there were found among his depicted army the exact representation of the genuine Negro race, both in color, hair, and physiognomy.  Negroes are also represented in Egyptian paintings as connected with the military campaigns of the eighteenth dynasty.  They formed a part of the army of Ibrahim Pacha, and were prized as gallant soldiers at Moncha and in South Arabia.[36] And Herodotus assures us that Negroes were found in the armies of Sesostris and Xerxes; and, at the present time, they are no inconsiderable part of the standing army of Egypt.[37] Herodotus states that eighteen of the Egyptian kings were Ethiopians.[38]

It is quite remarkable to hear a writer like John P. Jeffries, who evidently is not very friendly in his criticisms of the Negro, make such a positive declaration as the following:—­