Anatomists and physiologists have labored very earnestly to account for or to show the “cause” of color, not of the Negro alone, but in the case of our own race. They have generally supposed that the pigmentum nigrum, a substance lying immediately beneath the outward skin, or cuticle, constituted that cause, and therefore the complexion was fair or dark, blonde or brunette, just as the “coloring” matter might happen to be dark or otherwise. This, in a sense, is doubtless true, but to speak of it as a cause is an abuse of terms, for it is simply a fact, and no more a cause than it is an effect. Cause and causes in natural phenomena are known only to Omnipotence, and why the Caucasian color is white or the Mongol yellow, or the Negro black, is as absolutely hidden from us as the cause of their existence at all—as wholly beyond the scope of human intelligence, and therefore of rational inquiry, as the cause of the return of the seasons, or why men and animals at a certain time arrive at maturity or finally decay and die. The divine wisdom and perfect fitness of the fact itself, however, are clearly appreciable, and we are able to see, not only its transcendent importance, but the utter impossibility of its being otherwise. There is in all the works of God perfect harmony, as well as perfect wisdom, and, therefore, such a monstrosity as a “colored man”—or a being like ourselves in all except the color of the negro—is not merely absurd, but as impossible in fact, though not so palpable to a superficial intelligence, as a white body with a negro head on its shoulders, or indeed as a dog with the head of any other animal or form of being.