Page:An essay on the origin and relative status of the white and colored races of mankind.djvu/9

 gem-like eyes, of every shade of color; and its high intellectual forehead, surmounted by long straight flowing glossy hair, of various hues, is more attractive and fascinating than a monotonous sooty complexion, with a flat outline of features; eyes of opaque dark color; coarse dingy lips, and a low unintellectual forehead, overtopped with short dull black kinky wool; those who believe in the unity of the Races, with apologetic instinct, seem to think that black could not have been the original complexion of the black man; although its permanency was alluded to, in the early ages, by Jeremiah the Prophet, where he couples him with a wild carniverous animal of the brute creation, and emphatically asks the question—"Can the Ethiopean change his skin or the Leopard his spots?" If black was not his original complexion is it not rather strange that the Prophet should have referred to the permanency of his complexion, as illustrative of the unchangeabhness of the laws of Nature? and is it not equally strange, that, if such change had actually been made by miraculous power; as the only means by which a fixed law of Nature could be changed; that a Prophet endowed with Divine knowledge, such as Jeremiah was, should have been ignorant of it? or that no allusion, whatever, should have been made to it by any of the other inspired writers? We look, in vain, for the evidence of any such miracle. It is, however, claimed by some that the black man originally descended from Ham, upon whose son, Canaan, Noah pronounced a curse, to punish Ham for his indecent behaviour to his Father, (Noah,) when asleep, and, by which curse, it is claimed that the descendents of Ham were doomed to perpetual servitude; their skin blackened; their features flattened: and their hair changed to wool, &c. The words of the curse were as follows: