FOOTNOTES

[636] The Unity of the Human Races, pp. 14-17.

[637] Curse of Canaan, pp. 5-7.  By Rev. C.H.  Edgar.

* * * * *

CHAPTER III.

NEGRO CIVILIZATION.

DR. WISEMAN has also shown that both Aristotle and Herodotus describe the Egyptians—­to whom Homer, Lycurgus, Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato resorted for wisdom—­as having the black skin, the crooked legs, the distorted feet and the woolly hair of the Negro, from which we do not wish, or feel it necessary to infer that the Egyptians were Negroes, but first that the ideas of degradation and not-human, associated with the dark-colored African races of people now, were not attached to them at an early period of their history; and secondly, that while depicted as Negroes, the Egyptians were regarded by these profound ancients—­the one a naturalist and the other a historian—­as one of the branches of the human family, and as identified with a nation of whose descent from Ham there is no question.[638] Egyptian antiquity, not claiming priority of social existence for itself, often pointed to the regions of Habesh, or high African Ethiopia, and sometimes to the North, for the seat of the gods and demigods, because both were the intermediate stations of the progenitor tribes.[639]

There is, therefore, every reason to believe that the primitive Egyptians were conformed much more to the African than to the European form and physiognomy, and therefore that there was a time when learning, commerce, arts, manufactures, etc., were all associated with a form and character of the human race now regarded as the evidence only of degradation and barbarous ignorance.

But why question this fact when we can refer to the ancient and once glorious kingdoms of Meroe, Nubia, and Ethiopia, and to the prowess and skill of other ancient and interior African Nations?  And among the existing nations of interior Africa, there is seen a manifold diversity as regards the blackest races.  The characteristics of the most truly Negro race are not found in all, nor to the same degree in many.

Clapperton and other travellers among the Negro tribes of interior Africa, attest the superiority of the pure Negroes above the mixed races around them, in all moral characteristics, and describe also large and populous kingdoms with numerous towns, well cultivated fields, and various manufactures, such as weaving, dyeing, tanning, working in iron and other metals, and in pottery.[640]