[50] Nat. Hist. Human Species, p. 126. [51] Prichard, pp. 188-219. [52] Matt. xxiii. 4. [53] Discours sur la cause physicale de la couleur des negres. [54] Earth and Man. Lecture x. pp. 254, 255. [55] Blumenbach, p. 107. CHAPTER III. PRIMITIVE NEGRO CIVILIZATION. THE ANCIENT AND HIGH DEGREE OF NEGRO CIVILIZATION.--EGYPT, GREECE, AND ROME BORROW FROM THE NEGRO THE CIVILIZATION THAT MADE THEM GREAT.--CAUSE OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF NEGRO CIVILIZATION.--CONFOUNDING THE TERMS "NEGRO" AND "AFRICAN." It is fair to presume that God gave all the races of mankind civilization to start with. We infer this from the known character of the Creator. Before Romulus founded Rome, before Homer sang, when Greece was in its infancy, and the world quite young, "hoary Meroe" was the chief city of the Negroes along the Nile. Its private and public buildings, its markets and public squares, its colossal walls and stupendous gates, its gorgeous chariots and alert footmen, its inventive genius and ripe scholarship, made it the cradle of civilization, and the mother of art. It was the queenly city of Ethiopia,--for it was founded by colonies of Negroes. Through its open gates long and ceaseless caravans, laden with gold, silver, ivory, frankincense, and palm-oil, poured the riches of Africa into the capacious lap of the city. The learning of this people, embalmed in the immortal hieroglyphic, flowed adown the Nile, and, like spray, spread over the delta of that time-honored stream, on by the beautiful and venerable city of Thebes,--the city of a hundred gates, another monument to Negro genius and civilization, and more ancient than the cities of the Delta,--until Greece and Rome stood transfixed before the ancient glory of Ethiopia! Homeric mythology borrowed its very essence from Negro hieroglyphics; Egypt borrowed her light from the venerable Negroes up the Nile. Greece went to school to the Egyptians, and Rome turned to Greece for law and the science of warfare. England dug down into Rome twenty centuries to learn to build and plant, to establish a government, and maintain it. Thus the flow of civilization has been from the East--the place of light--to the West; from the Oriental to the Occidental. (God fixed the mountains east and west in Europe.)