Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 22, January, 1873Various
Science
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 22, January, 1873
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
The arctic savage clad in furs and eating blubber does not differ
essentially from his brother of the tropics. So much of his food is
necessarily converted into heat that he cannot afford to lead so active
a life; but he also, like him of the tropics, partakes with his
surroundings in color. The one, living amid snowclad scenery, where the
sparse vegetation is gray and grayish-green, and the birds and animals
almost as white as the snow over which they wander, is pale, etiolated.
The other, under a vertical sun, surrounded by a lush and lusty growth,
whose flowers for variety and intensity of color are beyond description,
and in which birds of brightest plumage and black and tawny beasts make
their home, has the most marked supply of pigment--is dark-hued, black,
in short a negro. Between these two extremes is the typical man, fair of
face, with expanded brow and wavy hair, well fed, well clad, well
housed, wresting from Nature her hidden things and making her mightiest
forces the workers of his will; heaping together knowledge, cherishing
art, reverencing justice, worshiping God. How startling the contrast
between brothers!
Such changes do not take place in a few generations. For their
completion hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years must elapse. The
descendants of the blacks who were carried from Africa to America as
slaves two centuries and a half ago, save where their color has been
modified by a mixed parentage, are still black. Already the influence
of new climatic surroundings and of association has wrought great
changes upon them: they are no longer savages. But their complexion is
as dark as that of their kidnapped forefathers. Their original physical
condition remains almost unaltered, and with it many mental
characteristics: their love of display and of bright colors, their
fondness for tune and the power of music to move them, their weird and
fantastic belief in ghosts and spirits, in signs, omens and charms, and
many other traits, still bear witness to their savage origin. But even
these are fading away, and these men are slowly but not the less surely
becoming civilized and _white_.
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