“August 21st. It is now about the hottest season of the year here; but I think I have felt it warmer in the City of Philadelphia, in the same month. “August 26th. This day I was introduced by Rosetti to the Aga Mahommed, the confidential Minister of Ismael, the most powerful of the four ruling Beys: he gave me his hand to kiss, and with it the promise of letters, protection, and support, through Turkish Nubia, and also to some Chiefs far inland. In a subsequent conversation, he told me I should see in my travels a people who had power to transmutate themselves into the forms of different animals. He asked me what I thought of the affair? I did not like to render the ignorance, simplicity, and credulity of the Turk apparent. I told him, that it formed a part of the character of all Savages to be great Necromancers; but that I had never before heard of any so great as those which he had done me the honour to describe; that it had rendered me more anxious to be on my voyage, and if I passed among them, I would, in the letter I promised to write to him, give him a more particular account of them than he had hitherto had.—He asked me how I could travel without the language of the people where I should pass? I told him, with vocabularies:—I might as well have read to him a page of Newton’s Principia. He returned to his fables again. Is it not curious, that the Egyptians (for I speak of the natives of the country as well as of him, when I make the observation) are still such dupes to the arts of sorcery? Was it the same people who built the Pyramids? “I can’t understand that the Turks have a better opinion of our mental powers than we have of theirs; but they say of us, that we are “_a people who carry our minds on our fingers ends_:” meaning, that we put them in exercise constantly, and render them subservient to all manner of purposes, and with celerity, dispatch, and ease, do what we do. “I suspect the Copts to have been the origin of the Negro race: the nose and lips correspond with those of the Negro. The hair, whenever I can see it among the people here, (the Copts) is curled;—not close like the Negros, but like the Mulattoes. I observe a greater variety of colour among the human species here than in any other country; and a greater variety of feature than in any other country not possessing a greater degree of civilization. “I have seen an Abyssinian woman and a Bengal man—the colour is the same in both; so are their features and persons.