The Abyssinians have preserved that antique type of Christianity which had Jewish usages; they had their own literature, alphabet, and old type of civilisation. According to Keane, the present inhabitants of Abyssinia form an extremely complex ethnical group in which it is not always possible to distinguish the constituent elements. The prevailing colour is a distinct brown, shading northwards to a light, olive, fair complexion, southwards to a deep chocolate and an almost sooty black. There are Abyssinians who may certainly be called black, and in whom the negro strain is revealed in the somewhat tumid lip, small nose, broad at base, and frizzly, black hair. But the majority may be described as a mixed Hamito-Semitic people, who, beyond question, belong fundamentally to the Caucasic division. While the Hamitic, Semitic, and the Latin branch of the Aryans are admitted to form a fertile, progressive admixture with the negro, the reverse is commonly assumed to be the case with the English speaking Celto-Teutons. Daniel Wilson[147] is of opinion that this is not true as to millions of the coloured race who now constitute the indigenous population of the Southern States. They are at home there in a climate to which the white race adapts itself with very partial success. The offspring of white fathers and of mothers of the African races, they have multiplied to millions; and now, with the recently acquired rights of citizenship, and with the advantage of education within their reach, the country is their town. The very social prejudices against miscegenation protect them from the effacing influence to which the Indian half-breed is exposed, by ever-recurrent intermarriage with the dominant race. As yet there are discernible the various degrees of heredity from the mulatto to the quinteron. But the abolition of slavery has placed the coloured race on an entirely new footing. Left as it now is, free to enjoy the healthful, social relations of a civilised community, and protected, by the very prejudices of race and caste, from any large intermixture with the white race, it can scarcely admit of doubt that there will survive on the American Continent a Melanochroi of its own, more distinctly separated from the white race, not only by heredity but also by climate influences, than the "dark Whites" of Europe are from the blonde types of Hellenic, Slavic, Teutonic, or Scandinavian stock. This condition will be modified by the fact that the negro American, like the others, is a traveller and, with a rise of culture, tends to city life.