nature and destined for immortality; but a vocal organism with its corresponding faculty or function is essentially the same thing in both, and differs only in form and degree among the innumerable beings that compose or are comprised within the vast world of animated existence. While language, therefore, the voice or faculty by which animals as well as human beings express their wants, is universal and only varied as the structure and nature are varied, and while the vocal organism is in exact harmony with the faculty or function in all cases and in every phase of animated existence, there is also, and of necessity, a specific modification of this faculty in the case of the several human races or species. The vocal organs of the negro differ widely from those of the white man, and of course there is a corresponding difference in the language. The specific or the most essential feature of the negro nature is his imitative instincts, or his capacity for imitating the qualities and for acquiring the habitudes of the white man. This, of course, is limited to his actual juxtaposition with the superior race, for aside from that organic necessity which utterly forbids its being otherwise, there is no historical fact better attested than that which shows him invariably relapsing into savageism whenever he is left without the restraining support of the former. But for wise and beneficent purposes, God has endowed him with a capacity of imitation, and he is enabled to apply it to such an extent that those ignorant of the negro nature actually offer it as a proof of his equal capacity! But with all his power to thus imitate the habits and to copy the language of the white man, it is not possible that a single example can be furnished of his success in regard to the latter. With us, and especially at the North, all are negroes who are tainted with negro blood, and thus many persons will imagine that they have seen negroes who were as competent to speak our language as white men themselves. But no actual or typical negro will be able—no matter what pains have been taken to “educate” him—to speak the language of the white man with absolute correctness. European ethnologists have, notwithstanding, sought to make language the means for tracing the history and determining the character of races, the worthlessness and indeed the absurdity of which only needs a single illustration to expose it. The negroes of Hayti have imitated or copied the language of their former masters, the French, therefore they are of the same race, and the future ethnologists would pronounce them Frenchmen! As the negro cannot preserve anything that he copies from the Caucasian beyond a certain period, the negroes of that island are rapidly losing all that they obtained from their former masters, and though the educated portion on the coasts, and especially the mongrels, yet retain the French language, those in the interior are rapidly relapsing into their native African tongue.