But no one expects any benevolent efforts from those who cavil and carp at efforts made by governments and peoples to heal the enormous open sore of the world.  Some profess that they would rather give “their mite” for the degraded of our own countrymen than to “niggers”!  Verily it is “a mite,” and they most often forget, and make a gift of it to themselves.  It is almost an axiom that those who do most for the heathen abroad are most liberal for the heathen at home.  It is to this class we turn with hope.  With others arguments are useless, and the only answer I care to give is the remark of an English sailor, who, on seeing slave-traders actually at their occupation, said to his companion, “Shiver my timbers, mate, if the devil don’t catch these fellows, we might as well have no devil at all.”

In conversing with a prince at Johanna, one of the Comoro islands lying off the north end of Madagascar, he took occasion to extol the wisdom of the Arabs in keeping strict watch over their wives.  On suggesting that their extreme jealousy made them more like jailers than friends of their wives, or, indeed, that they thus reduced themselves to the level of the inferior animals, and each was like the bull of a herd and not like a reasonable man—­“fuguswa”—­and that they gave themselves a vast deal of trouble for very small profit; he asserted that the jealousy was reasonable because all women were bad, they could not avoid going astray.  And on remarking that this might be the case with Arab women, but certainly did not apply to English women, for though a number were untrustworthy, the majority deserved all the confidence their husbands could place in them, he reiterated that women were universally bad.  He did not believe that women ever would be good; and the English allowing their wives to gad about with faces uncovered, only showed their weakness, ignorance, and unwisdom.

The tendency and spirit of the age are more and more towards the undertaking of industrial enterprises of such magnitude and skill as to require the capital of the world for their support and execution—­as the Pacific Railroad, Suez Canal, Mont Cenis Tunnel, and railways in India and Western Asia, Euphrates Railroad, &c.  The extension and use of railroads, steamships, telegraphs, break down nationalities and bring peoples geographically remote into close connection commercially and politically.  They make the world one, and capital, like water, tends to a common level.

[Geologists will be glad to find that the Doctor took pains to arrange his observations at this time in the following form.]