the most impious among these people would scarcely undertake the latter operation. If reason could at all enter into the matter, it would surely be more reasonable to suppose that mind might be changed by acting on matter, rather than the reverse, and therefore it would be better to change the color of the skin, as the first, as it would also be the most practicable, step to be taken in this grand undertaking of setting aside the Creator and re-creating the negro. But, after all, their labors would fail—after they had changed the color, after they had increased the volume of the brain and duly modified its relations as well as altered its texture—in short, when they had turned him into a white man, then all would be in vain, for such a brain could no more be born of a negress than an elephant could be! CHAPTER XII. GENERAL SUMMARY. In the several preceding chapters, those outward characteristics that specifically distinguish the negro have been briefly considered. It has been shown that color, the hair, the figure, the brain, etc., are simply facts out of many millions of facts that separate the races; that each and all of them are original, invariable, and everlasting, and the exception, or the absence of any of them, or of any of the associated facts not enumerated, at any time, in the case of a single individual or any generation, or under any possible circumstances of time, climate, or external agencies whatever, is, or would be, necessarily impossible. Nature is always true to herself, and even in those abnormal specimens sometimes presented to our observation—those so-called monstrosities—there is, properly speaking, no departure from her original designs, or from those fixed and eternal laws that govern organic life. We sometimes see Albinos, but except a certain tinge to the color, itself totally unlike any color in other races, the absolute negro, that is the millions of facts that constitute the negro being, are untouched. We witness all kinds of abnormal development in our own race, in animals, in the vegetable world, in all the innumerable beings and things that surround us. For example—let any one spend an autumn day in the forest, and turn his attention to the strange and often ludicrous sights that surround him. It often seems as if nature delighted herself in creating odd and uncouth shapes, as if intended for relaxation and relief from her graver and grander labors. But even here there is no violation of the higher law—the order of nature though very often interrupted by accident, is never contradicted—the abnormal development, the most uncouth and monstrous consequences are still pervaded by the eternal decree stamped upon the whole universe, that forbids forever any change in the minutest atom of this mighty mass of life. The Albino, the deformed or monstrous Negro, the seemingly wide departure from the normal standard, still obeys the higher law.