The Negro in the South / His Economic Progress in Relation to his Moral and Religious Development

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ian, and the Arabian "Land of the Blacks." To modern Europe it is the "Dark Continent" and "Land of Contrasts"; in literature it is the seat of the Sphinx and the lotus eaters, the home of the dwarfs, gn

rld history. Yet it is true that the history of Africa is unusual, and its strangeness is due in no small degree to the physical peculiarities of the continent. With three times the area of Europe it has a coast line a fifth shorter. Like Europe it is a peninsula of Asia, curving s

ree thousand or more feet above the sea, while in the north it is a little over one thousand feet. Thus two main divisions of the continent are easily distinguished: the broad northern r

the Great Lakes and flowing northward "like some grave, mighty thought, threading a dream"; the Niger in the northwest, watering the Sudan below the Sahara; and, finally, the Zambesi, wi

xuriance. The flora is rich but not wide in variety, including the gum acacia, ebony, several dye woods, the kola nut, and probably tobacco and millet. To the

d with no surprise or dislike, because this world saw them come and go and play their part with other men. Was Clitus the brother-in-law of Alexander the Great less to be honored because he happened to be black? Was Terence less famous? T

t the darker races in other parts of the world have, in the last four centuries, lagged behind the flying and even feverish foo

efusal to do this which has led to so much false writing on Africa and of its inhabitants. Take, for instance, the answer to the apparently simple question "What is a Negro?" We find the most extraordinary confusion of thought and difference of opinion. There is a certain type in the minds of most people which, as David Livingstone said, can be found only in caricature and not in real life. When scientists have tried to find an extreme type of black, ugly, and woolly-haired Negro, they

e. In the case of no other race is so narrow a definition attempted. A "white" man may be of any color, size, or facial conformatio

visions of men in broad outlines. As Von Luschan says, "The question of the number of human races has quite lost its raison d'être and has become a subject rather of philosophic speculation than of scientific research. It is of no more importance now to

ck or a mingling of the two) is as typically African as the black man and cannot logically be inc

sometimes everted lips, a tendency to a development of the maxillary parts of the face, and a dolichocephalic head. This type is not fixed or definite. The color varies widely; it is n

om that type was interpreted as meaning mixture of blood. To-day we recognize a broader normal African type which, as Palgrave says, may best be studied "among the statues of the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum; the larger gentle e

e skin and other organs, have given men their differences of color. This color pigment is a protection against sunlight and consequently varies with the intensity of t

ed hair is found among the yellow Hottentots and Bushmen. The difference between the hair of the lighter and darker races is a difference of degree, not of kind, and can be easily measured. If the hair follicles of a China-man, a European, and a Negr

there are no hard and fast racial types among men. Race is a dynamic and not a static conception, and the typical races are continually changing and developing, amalgamating and differentiating. In this little book, then, we are studying the hi

and long-continued that it is impossible to-day to disentangle the blood relationships. Negro blood certainly appears in strong strain among the Semites, and the obvious mulatto groups in Africa, arising from a

rthern coasts a thousand years before Christ and began settlements which culminated in Ca

and others. Roman Africa was bounded by the desert, but at times came into contact with the blacks across the Sahara and in the valley of the Nile.

ontinent from Europe for a thousand years and converting vast masses of the blacks to Islam. The Portuguese began to raise the veil in the fifteenth century, saili

unded the Cape of Good Hope and pursued their explorations as far as the mountains of Abyssinia. This began the modern exploration of Africa, which is a curious fairy tale,

thout, which made it so easily possible for the great human drama played here to hide itself from the ears of other worlds; and, on the other hand, the absence of interior barriers-the great s

ure hostile to the uprise of Humanity. Here Beelzebub, King of the Flies, marshals his vermiform and arthropod hosts-insects, ticks, and nematode worms-which more than in other continents (excepting Negroid Asia) convey to the skin, veins, intestines, and spinal marrow of men and other vertebrates the microorganisms which cause deadly,

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in Inter-Racial

gro in the New W