There is an impassable chasm, wide as it is deep and everlasting, between the human and animal creation. But while the negro has nothing whatever in common with animals that we ourselves have not, in all those things or qualities in a sense common to both men and animals, the negro has a vastly larger approximation to the latter. As the intelligence or the capacity of providing for itself, therefore, is more rapidly developed in the animal, so, too, in the case of the negro child, at a certain age it is less dependent on the care and affection of the mother than is that of white people. Those ignorant and perverse persons who stifle the impulses and sympathies with which God has endowed them for their kind, and engage in teaching, as they suppose, negro children, have been so impressed by this fact, that in their utter ignorance of the negro nature, they have inferred that the latter was really the superior race; they have often found a negro boy or girl of ten years, for example, whose perceptions, memory, etc., seemed to them, and, doubtless, sometimes were, more clear, prompt, and decided, than those of white children of the same age, and therefore they were quite convinced of the superiority of the negro and of the sublimity and immensity of their own labors in thus helping on the intellectual development of a wronged and down-trodden but really superior race. But if they could have followed out the future of these children for a few years, and were persons of sufficient understanding to analyze facts at all, they would have made a still more startling discovery than that of the fancied superiority of the negro. The negro mind reaches its maturity, its complete development, at from twelve to fifteen years, and though there may be vastly more knowledge or experience, the negro of fifty has no more actual mental capacity than he had at fifteen. The faculties directly dependent on the senses are actively and rapidly developed in the negro child, but the reflective faculties, the faculties in regard to which the senses are mere avenues through which external influences are conveyed to the brain, are absent, of course, in the negro, for there is an absence of brain itself, and therefore it is just as absurd to imagine him possessing them as to suppose the sense of sight in any creature without eyes or without an organism for that faculty. The white boy, on the contrary, only begins at this age to manifest the reflective faculties, which, constantly expanding, doubtless reach their maturity from twenty to twenty-five. Of course the mind may continue to expand in a sense for many years, for a life-time, but the actual mental capabilities, like those of the body, doubtless reach their normal standard from twenty to twenty-five. Thus, a white boy and negro of ten, with the faculties directly dependent on the senses possibly most active in the latter, begin a year or two later to diverge from each other.