There being nothing superior to the Caucasian, it may be said that he is endowed with unlimited powers; that is, while the mental organism remains the same, his powers of acquisition and the increase of his knowledge have no limit. A generation in the exercise of its faculties acquires a certain amount of knowledge; this is transmitted to the next; it, in turn, adds its proportion, and so on, each generation in its turn accepting the knowledge of its progenitors and transmitting with its own acquisitions the sum total to its successors. This is called civilization, and we can suppose no limit to it, except it be in the destruction of the existing order and a new creation. On the contrary, the negro brain is incapable of grasping ideas, or what we call abstract truths, as absolutely so as the white child, indeed as necessarily incapable of such a thing as for a person to see without eyes, or hear without ears. In contact with, and permitted to imitate the white man, the negro learns to read, to write, to make speeches, to preach, to edit newspapers, etc., but all this is like that of the boy of ten or twelve who debates _à la_ Webster or declaims from Demosthenes. People ignorant of the negro mistake this borrowed for real knowledge, as one ignorant of metals may have a brass watch imposed on him for a golden one. The negro is therefore incapable of progress, a single generation being capable of all that millions of generations are, and those populations in Africa isolated from white men are exactly now as they were when the Hebrews escaped from Egypt, and where they must be millions of years hence, if left to themselves. Of course this is no mere opinion or conjecture of the author. It is a necessity of the negro being—a consequence of the negro structure—a fixed and eternally inseparable result of the mental organism, which without a re-creation—another brain—could no more be otherwise than water could run up hill, or a reversal of the law of gravitation in any respect could be possible. But people, ignorant of the elementary principles of science as well as of the nature of the negro, fancy that this is quite possible; that, however inferior the organism of the negro in these respects, it is the result of many centuries of savagery and “slavery,” and therefore if he were made “free,” given the same rights with the same chances for mental cultivation, that the brain might gradually alter and become like that of the white man! This involves gross impiety, if it were not the offspring of ignorance and folly, for it supposes that chance and human forces are more potent than the Almighty Creator, whose work is thus the sport of circumstances. They would seek by stimulating the mind to add ten per cent. to the negro brain—then to add to the cerebrum while they diminished the cerebellum—certainly a work of much greater magnitude than changing the color of the negro skin; but even the most ignorant or