Page:An essay on the origin and relative status of the white and colored races of mankind.djvu/38

 It has also been claimed that Euclid, the great mathematician, was a black man. His biographers do not say so; and they acknowledge, moreover, that the place of his nativity is unknown; but having taught mathematics and compiled his books in Alexandria, in Egypt, and the Egyptian King, (Ptolomy,) having been one of his sudentsstudents [sic], I think it is most probable that he was born in or near Alexandria. At the time of the Deluge, there were only four pair of human beings who went into Noah's Ark, to wit: Noah and his wife, and his three sons—Shem, Ham and Japhet—and their wives; and, as there are at least five distinct varieties or Races of the human species in existence, it follows as a necessary consequence, that the head of one of the five Races had no place in the list of Noah's family who went into the Ark: and the black man, being of the lowest type of the human races, it is not probable that he was taken into it, to the exclusion of a Race of a higher type; and hence we can only account for his existence, by a separate and distinct creation of another Race, in accordance with the opinions of the most learned and scientific Naturalists of the present age. In support of the inequality and incongruity of the two extreme Races, as bearing upon their disunity, I quote the views and opinions of some of our most eminent statesmen of all political parties and sections of our country, from the administration of the elder Adam's down to that of Abraham Lincoln. The elder Adams said, "I have never read reasoning more absurd; sophistry more gross, * * * * * * than the subtle labors of Helvetius and Rosseau, to demonstrate the natural equality of mankind." Thomas Jefferson said, "Nothing is more certainly written in the Book of Fate, than that these people are to be free, nor is it less certain that the two Races, equally free, cannot live under the same government."