What struck me in the Oriental was a kind of childishness. Both men and women appeared to be only children of a larger growth. There was an expression of childishness in their features, and there were very perceptible indications of a corresponding condition of their minds. It looked like moral and intellectual arrest. The manhood of the mind had never been called into exercise, and had, in consequence, become aborted. They never think. Why should they? All truth of every kind has already been fully revealed to them. To question what they have received, or to endeavour to attain to more, would be impious. They have hardly any occasion to act, for is it not Allah who directly does everything as it pleases Him, on the earth beneath, as well as in the heaven above?... There is in them a softness of expression which could not co-exist with activity, and firmness, and largeness of brain. Child-like, they believe anything and everything. The more wonderful, and the more contradictory to nature it may be, the more readily do they believe it. They have no idea of extorting the secrets of nature. What good would it do them to seek to know anything or everything? Allah will reveal what He pleases, and when. Such knowledge would not promote their happiness. Their idea of blissfulness is that of the Arab of the Desert. Shade and rest. Plashing fountains and delightful odours. Lovely houris. This is not the stuff that makes men. Nature also works against them. Much time is needed for the acquisition and digestion of knowledge, and for the growth of the moral and intellectual faculties to what we regard as their full stature. The time, however, allotted to them for these sovereign purposes is very short. Where girls are married women at eleven, what time can there be for the mind to mature itself? Compare this with the many years of deliberate culture amongst ourselves. What can be done by the age of eleven? What should we be if our mental culture and growth ended at that age? But in their case it is so with half the community—the mothers; and so also with the other half—the fathers, only in a somewhat less degree. Of the negroes of the interior Sir Samuel Baker observes that the little children are quick enough, but that mental development appears to have ceased by the age of fourteen. I observed, and heard from several Americans that they had observed, something of the same kind in the negro schools of the United States. Up to an age not quite so advanced as that Sir S. Baker speaks of, the coloured children appear to be as quick as the children of the whites; but beyond that point they begin to fall behind. Their apprehensiveness appears to have exhausted itself. This must doom the black race in the United States, in their struggle with the whites for the means of subsistence, to extinction. Just so, too, must his prematurity always place the Oriental, in the struggle between nations, at a disadvantage in comparison with the European. In him Nature