The present is an interesting period in the history of the world. Changes are rapid and irrevocable. Circumstances illustrative of the condition of our race as it has been, are disappearing rapidly. The future must trust to our philosophic observation, and faithful testimony, for its knowledge of savage life. The helplessness, and artlessness, and miserable shifts of barbarism are becoming things of the past. There is perhaps no region of the earth which is now altogether beyond the reach of civilized arts. Shells, and flints, and bows, and clubs, and bone-headed spears are everywhere giving way to more useful or more formidable implements. Improvements in dress and tools and furniture will soon be universal. The history of man as he has been, requires therefore to be written now, while the evidence illustrative of it has not altogether vanished. The changes of the last three centuries have, to only a slight degree, influenced the African races. An inaccessible interior, and a coast bristling with slave-factories, and bloody with slaving cruelties, probably account for this. The slight progress made shows the obduracy of the degradation to be removed, and the difficulty of the first steps needed for its removal. Wherever the slave-trade or its effects penetrated, there of course peace vanished, and prosperity became impossible. This evil affected not only the coast, but spread warfare to rob the country of its inhabitants, far into the interior regions. There were tribes, however, uninfluenced by it, and some of these have gained extensive, although but temporary authority. Yet nowhere has there been any real civilization. It is singular that these people should have rested in this unalloyed barbarism for thousands of years, and that there should have been no native-born advancement, as in Mexico, or Peru, or China; and no flowing in upon its darkness of any glimmering of light from the brilliant progress and high illumination of the outside world. It has been considered worthy of note, that a few years ago one of the Veys had contrived a cumbrous alphabet to express the sounds of his language; but it is surely, to an incomparable degree, more a matter of surprise, that centuries passed away in communication with Europeans, without such an attempt having been made by any individual, of so many millions, during so many generations of men. The older state of negro society, therefore, still continues. With the exception of civilized vices, civilized arms, and some amount of civilized luxuries, life on the African coast, or at no great distance from it, remains now much the same as the first discoverers found it. As it was two hundred years ago, the food of the people consists of rice, maize and millet; or the Asiatic, the American and the African native grains. A few others, of comparatively little importance, might be added to these. Many fruits, as bananas, figs and pumpkins, compose part of their subsistence.