Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/374

Rh prohibition and drive all swine out of the country, then would the Union be saved from the greatest evil after civil war, fromDyspepsia! But among so much that is beautiful and so much that is good, I ought not any longer to detain myself with pigs!

I have had some beautiful rambles here and there in the neighbourhood, and have made many interesting acquaintance also out of the house. Foremost among these must I mention the Phrenologist, Dr. Buchanan, an intellectual, eccentric little man, full of life and human love, who greatly interests me by his personal character and by the large views which he takes in his Neurology and Analysis of the human brain, “of the immense possibilities of man,” allowing at the same time wide scope to the freedom of the human will. Buchanan is, in a high degree, a spiritualist, and he regards spiritual powers too as the most potent agents of all formation; regards the immaterial life as the determiner of the material. Thus he considers the will in man as determining the inner being, as influencing the development of the ductile brain, for good or for evil, and the ductile brain as operating upon, elevating or depressing the skull.

Farther, I am cheered in a high degree by the views current here, on the subject of Slavery and its possible eradication, and as regards the future of the negroes, as well as of Africa, through its colonisation by Christian negroes from America, settled on the coast of Africa, and by the products of free labour in a wholly tropical climate being superior to that of slave-labour in a half-tropical climate.

I read, in the African Repository, a periodical which is published here by Mr. D. Christy, agent of the Colonisation Society in Ohio, some interesting papers on the subject of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the