About this time we became a good deal interested in one of the soldiers of our escort who had travelled with us throughout our journey. He was a large man, with black skin, but with hair and lips of less pronounced Negro type than we see among the natives of western equatorial Africa. When leaving Mogador he had an ulcerous sore on one hand, which was much swollen and almost useless. The sore, under Hooker’s treatment, was quite healed, and he was genuinely grateful for the benefit. Alone among the soldiers of our escort he did what he could to forward our desire to explore the mountain valleys; and of late, on more than one occasion, he had given useful information that helped us to defeat the petty intrigues of Kaïd el Hasbi. By our direction Abraham made some inquiry as to his previous history, and he quite readily told his story. He belonged, as it appeared, to one of the tribes that inhabit the skirts of the Great Desert on the south side of the Great Atlas. They led a predatory life, gaining an uncertain living by robbing travellers, and killing those who made resistance. After some years passed in this way, our friend seemed to have taken a dislike to the mode of life, and enlisted as a soldier in the service of the Sultan of Marocco. In his new position he had gained or developed some elementary notions of religion and morality, and he now expressed a strong opinion as to the impropriety of robbery and murder. Here was a case such as is often cited by superficial travellers to show the absence of a moral sense among savage people. This man had no doubt robbed and murdered in his youth without the slightest compunction; but, given the conditions under which the ethical sense could be developed, the result was to produce an individual morally superior to the majority of those around him. The analogy, so well drawn by Reid, between the moral nature of man and the development of the plant from the seed holds good. External conditions are necessary; but they do not create the germ, without which no evolution can follow. The conditions vary from one individual to another. One requires to be fostered by many favourable influences; another, with stronger vitality, will bud forth under the least auspicious conditions. The assertion that there are human beings in whom it is impossible to awaken any sense of difference between right and wrong must be, at least, premature, until the world shall have reached a social condition in which each individual may be tried under appropriate conditions.