Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/94

82 countenance. Their color at first would assume a brighter glossier black, than the color of the adult African, and in some cases enabled me to understand the raptures of a Dignitary of our Church over some of the Negroes of Ethiopia, when he wrote of the Sheygija; "they are a clear glossy jet-black which appeared to my then unprejudiced eyes to be the finest color that could be selected for a human being." Waddington's Visit to Ethiopia p. 122. What that color might eventually become in the island of Cuba which is on the border of the tropics, in the lapse of any considerable number of years, I could not judge of, as from the policy, of the slave dealers and slave owners few females comparatively were brought over, as they found it easier to buy the adult slave ready for work than to rear up their progeny. But in the colored population of the Bahama Islands and of the Southern States of the American Union, I observed their color was already manifestly becoming lighter or brown or olive, I may say so universally that I could only ascribe it to the climate and not to any admixtures. The hair certainly still remained woolly, but the climate was perhaps yet too similar to the African in temperature to have any effect upon it for a much longer period of time than had elapsed since their progenitors were brought there. But this was not all. Not only was the color lightened, but their features were also altered, and I thought I could distinctly trace in the colored population the same cast of countenance which we find marks the white natives of that continent in a very early stage of their generations. This cast of countenance some of our Ethnographers may perhaps sometime hence describe as the Yankee type, or by some fine name from the Greek ending in esian, among the Varieties of the Human Species, for which if any illustration is required I have only to refer you to the Portraits of the Presidents and other leading Statesmen of the Union and to the general average number of American citizens, whom we cannot fail to recognize almost at a glance in our streets. We observe in them an elongated countenance of a whitey brown color, strong coarse hair, a rigidity of features, lank figures, with a length of arms and legs disproportionate to their frame. The females lose the color of their European parents, and attain a statuesque style of beauty, in like manner very different from the softness and fulness of the English, these changes resulting in the same type whether their parents were of British or Continental origin. When we see such changes going on unmistakenly under our present observation, in our own generation and among our own kindred,