ther investigation. And that we are authorized, and even called upon in seeking out the origin of races, to look beyond revelation, will be readily conceded by those who consider the very different construction from the popular one, which science has placed on the Mosaic account of the world's beginning. Nor are we forbidden to reason on this subject because we may not as yet be able to establish the correctness of a different and better interpretation. It required ages to explain the allegory of inanimate creation; and it will yet require years of laborious research to remove all the mystery of man's origin.

To him who looks out on the world with an inquiring eye, it would seem that there could remain no longer a doubt, in regard to diversities in the human family, independent of climatic and sectional influences. For over all the earth, wherever man is found, he beholds the unvarying marks of species; but not a trace of any uniform effects from either heat or cold, fertility or barrenness. From the bleak and inhospitable regions of Terra del Fuego, through the torrid Pampas and forests of the Amazon, as far as to the icy abode of the Esquimaux, the Amercan Aborigines are physically the same. The negroes of Van Dieman's Landf and Caffrariat are even darker in complexion than the Abyssins, the Gallas, and numerous tribes of Ethiopia, which roam beneath the scorching sun of the Line. The white man possesses the same organization on the cheerless mountains of Caucasus as in the loveliest valleys of the Rhine. And the black man is the same, whether on the arid wastes of his native Nigritia, or the exuberant fields of the American States. Local influence may affect its subject for a season or a life; but it has never wrought an hereditary change. The same sun in his round of ages could never have bleached the European, and blackened the African, or tinged the Asiatic with yellow, and the Indian with red. Uniformity without variableness is the offspring of nature; and when we find this following not in the train of extraneous causes, we must turn to race itself as the key to the mystery. Behold then the world divided not less into continents, than it is by families of men. Australia and South Africa, whither the roving Arab has not fought his way, present a species of the most distinct character-stamped, as it is, with the impress of its own degradation. The Aborigines of the New World bear every mark of a peculiar people. As the beings of a day, in their slender proportions and delicate hue, they exhibit the signs of their own evanescence. Asia teems with its countless myriads; and, though varying somewhat among themselves, yet all together bearing a sufficient resemblance to distinguish them from every race besides. Europe too appears proudly exhibiting its characteristic species. And what is yet more striking, under similar circumstances and the same climate, in which is found every variety of mankind, this continent alone affords the spectacle of an aboriginal white man.

* Malte Brun's "Univ. Geog." Boston Ed. of 8 vols., Coll. Lib. vol. 5, p. 15. + Malte Brun, vol. 1, p. 547.

+ Prichard's "Phys. Hist. of Mankind," 3d Ed., Lond. vol. 2, p. 289.

§ Prichard, vol. 2, p. 136.

|| Prichard, vol. 2, p. 156.

But there is a still more

Such are the physical diversities of races. marked distinction appearing in their physical characters; between which and the former, there is an obvious but strange connection. One race seems, as it were, set aside by the hand of Providence, for a doom of the most dismal degradation. Another appears sadly fated to grope ever in mere conceptions of wild sports here, and hunting grounds hereafter. A third, amid all the elements of progress, is bound down under an immutable conservatism. While yet another seems equally destined, and rapidly speeding on, to the highest perfection of humanity. Those lands of the Negro, to which the dim light of Islam, or the rays of foreign culture have never penetrated, present the gloomiest picture of man. It is there that he has arisen,

in no sense, above an instinctive existence. Without a letter or symbol of language, barren and blank in intellect, aroused from habitual stupor only by the clang of horrid dissonance, like the brute he lives," and seems like the brute to pass away. The American Indians are a people of unique character-having many noble traits, but wholly incapable of permanent civilization or improvement. They seem to have been created merely to be the tenants of an unoccupied territory, till in the fullness of time, it should become the home of a mightier race. That time has come; and now before the white man, they vanish like a breath of air; and soon will be numbered only by their bleaching bones on our plains. Wide over the continent of the orient dwells another race, midway in the ascent of civilization It is here, that man, with every incentive of a bountiful nature, and of rich discoveries, as it were with the thread of his own destiny in his hands, has plodded on for untold ages in the same profitless round. Nations here have sprung up in a day, have swept, like the storm-king, over all the East, and again as speedily have disappeared. Here unceasingly, since the Earth has been tenanted by man, has been witnessed the spectacle of myriads jostling against myriads-of Empires clashing with Empires-yet Asia is Asia still-a vast sea of humanity that stagnates over half the world. From these sad contemplations we turn to Europe-the birth-place of progress-the home of refinement. Select from the chart of Earth that spot, the blackest with mountains, the most jagged with stormy seas, and every way the most unpromising of any the sun beholds; and you have marked the land of civilization's nativity. In this bleak corner, sprung up those fair favorites of nature, who have ever gloried in advancement as the state alone congenial to them, and who are nobly bearing onward all that is enlightened in humanity.

Who now will say, what, other than native character, produced these astonishing differences? What, but the impress of the Creator's hand at their origin, made the white man civilized, the dark man half civilized, the red man savage, and the black man brutish? It is no answer to say that education or state of society might gradually have wrought the diversity; for the question again reverts back upon those very influences; and we ask, what occasioned their existence, or what brought them to affect separately each species as a whole, distinguishing it from every other?

Again, who will show the external causes which have made the European, from the very infancy of his being, the lord and arbiter of Earth? Behold the monuments of the Macedonian, reared on the Indus and on the Nile. Behold Asia and Africa cowering before the resistless Cæsars. The host of Persia cross into Europe for conquest, but scatter in fright and dismay when the bold Greek comes out to battle. The Saracens make the sweeping circuit of the "midland sea," and plant the crescent of Islam in the heart of Europe; but speedily again recoil before the chivalrous Franks. The Spaniards' rude cannon is heard on the plains of the Aztecs, and forthwith the conquest, of the "White Gods" is extended wide as their terrible fame. While the dark races have ever bowed a willing neck to the most abject despotisms, and while every revolution throughout the East has but reproduced this same sad feature; the European has unceasingly fostered the principles of freedom, and every governmental change, from the earliest times to the present, has served but to make more republican his civil institutions. This same democratic element we find in the municipal structures of the Southern republics, as also in the laws of the ancient Briton and German; and beyond this race, the world presents no other such spectacle. Men, in early stages of society, have wrought out for themselves two distinct forms of natural religion; and these, if any thing can, must indicate original character. We find then, the most prevalent to be, a symbolical idolatry-a gross materialism, which formed the cumbrous machinery of the worship of brutes, of "stocks and stones," or of the celestial orbs. Such are Fetichism, Shamanism, Boodhism, and the varied forms of Pantheism and Sabeism. The other is a personified mythology—a beautiful idealism; in which alone is recognized the existence of an extra-mundane God. This religion, whether figured under its Saturn or Zeus, its Odin or Veli-bog, is the only and peculiar creation of the white man.* all the East, the South, and the West, polygamy and sensuality have reigned with unbridled license. How different-how chaste and pure comparatively, has been society in Europe, from the very infancy of its nations! Here too, on the soil of this small continent, mind has cast off its shackles, and widened its realm, till now the very elements of nature and the attributes of soul are subservient to its uses and pleasure. By the beautiful art of stamping thought, the dead live on in all their former greatness. By simply poising the magnet, the trackless ocean at once lost its terrors, and New Worlds loomed up beyond it. The lawless vapor of the sky is bolted in, and made to bear man's burdens. The sun stoops to paint his image, and the lightning does his errands. The soul, too, opens to the light of day its own dark caverns; and mind explores the mystery of mind. But beyond his native home, wherever the white man has appeared to assert his supremacy of intellect, the spectacle is still the same. Long ages back, he mysteriously came to the wilds of this Western Continent, and started into magic being a beautiful but frail civilization and long did the red man worship his "white and bearded god." The fair sons of

* Prichard, vol. 3, p. 12.

:

+ Prescott, "Conq. of Mex." vol. 1, p. 60; Bradford, " Am. Antiq." p. 301.

Over

Circassia have formed for centuries the ruling castes of Egypt and either Turkey." And many a once humble merchant on the Thames and Zuider Zee, is now basking in oriental state.

Such is European superiority. And we say again, let him who can assign for it a foreign cause. It is vain to point to any tendencies in the natural world; for these cannot produce genius; nor often have they favored its development. Equally vain is it to refer the cause to a concurrence of circumstances; the chances against which, even if any could be conjectured sufficient to the effect, would be beyond computation. Again must we revert to native character. And, as we behold a Newton born to greatness, so must we regard this race as created to its supremacy. At intervals down through the generations of men, the Creator has seen fit to send forth some giant mind, whose capacities should astonish, or whose might awe, the wondering pigmies beneath it. So likewise, to vary the monotony of ages, has He ushered into being a powerful race-a master-piece of His mysterious workmanship-whose Titan arm should wield the destinies of a benighted world. Why He has wrought in His Creation so incomprehensibly, it may not be for us to inquire. The Lord God made it soand it is good.

It is an opinion quite common, in regard to the origin of races, that it is referable to a period immediately following the Deluge, and to those descendants of Noah who receive divine blessings or curses. This, however, is founded, we think, on no direct authority of Holy Writ; which, in that connection, specifies only what may be explained more plausibly by events comparatively local and immediate. Thus, the malediction on the son of Ham was fulfilled in the subjection and enslavement of the Canaanites to Israel; and the blessing of Shem in the prosperity of the latter. Surely the assertions that Japheth shall be enlarged, and shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant,' are very far from having received their verification in any past or existing order of things, if these patriarchs were the authors of races. Again, that the scriptural account of the Deluge does not necessarily imply its literal universality, we have very clear evidence, as well as high authority. And that it was not in fact universal, is now generally maintained by scientific men, and conceded by most divines. For, to the geologist, the physical appearance of the Earth presents no indications of a flood prevailing over all lands at one and the same time; but, on the contrary, every presumption against it. The natural historian affirms that the dissemination of animals from one common center is not only impossible, but contradicted by innumerable facts. The theologian perceives the necessity of such an unparalleled combination of miracles, in the collection, storage and sustenance for nearly a year, of over an hundred thousand zoological species, in an Ark of but an acre's area, that he also is compelled to assign a comparatively limited extent to the Noachian

* Blackwood Mag. for 1849, vol. 28, p. 134.

+ John P. Smith's "Relation of Scrip. and Geol.," London, 1839, p. 304.

Deluge*. Nor can this tendency of modern science to modify and explain, by the intervention of natural causes, the phenomena of Bible history, with the exception of avowed miracles, be regarded as in the least heretical. So far from it, it must give us the noblest conceptions of a Deity, to reflect that the wondrous machinery of the universe, moved and regulated solely by a few grand laws, works out of itself His own eternal purposes. There is then no necessity, arising either from the Mosaic records, or the universality of the Flood, for accounting Noah as the second progenitor of all the human family.

In the days of Abram, the tenth in descent from the patriarch of the Deluge, Egypt was a populous country, the seat of a flourishing empire. On the other side, Assyria "of the Chaldees" was on its march of refinement and magnificence; and on every hand, we read of "kings of nations," and "captains of hosts," coming out to battle on those ancient plains. Before the time of Moses, in the tomb of Osiris far up the Nile, the Egyptian was painted with all the peculiarities of the Copt at the present day, and with him were represented the white and blue-eyed stranger from the North, and the sable son of the South.† Long back in time, in the cave of Elephanta, of which not even the ancient books or traditions of the Brahmins have preserved an account, were placed the sculptured images of the Indian, the perfect statues of the modern Hindoo, and of the crisp-haired African. Thus, to the earliest date of history, must we refer the existence of permanent nations, as also the existence, in them and around them, of permanent races. And no one will gravely say, that either through or from Egypt, there went out a tribe which was so soon found to be the ill-formed Negro, from India another branch which immediately stood forth as the fair Caucasian, and from China another which appeared as the red race, while the original families remained of the same dark hue and peculiar organization.

If now we turn to the researches which have been made in relation to the antiquity of the old Empires of Asia, we will find that all antiquarians, without giving the least credence to the pretensions of those nations to a prodigious age, but judging from their literature connected with accidental astronomical observations, have dated back their origin to a period coeval with, and in most cases long anterior to the scriptu ral era of the Deluge. They are united, so far as I have been able to find, in fixing the dawn of reliable history, in Egypt,§ in either India,|| and in China,¶ between the first century after and the fifth before that epoch. And beyond these comparatively authentic periods, traditions

*John Pye Smith, p. 159.

+ Creppo's "Researches of Champollion," p. 264. Asiatic Researches, vol. 4, p. 431 and 433.

§ Prichard, vol. 2, p. 199. Creppo's Cham., p. 82.

|| Prichard, vol. 4, p. 105 and 106; also p. 107, note, and vol. 2, p. 195 and 196. Heeren "On Anc. Nat. of Asia," vol. 3, p. 291 and 304.

¶ Prichard, vol. 4, p. 474-477.