For this strange, eccentric Nature, who meant _man_ from the beginning, and failed to realize her ideal because of those horrible nightmare dreams of which these saurians, mastodons, mammoths were the visible representatives, did, nevertheless, make, in every succeeding world (for every crust of this planet is the crust of a dead world), higher and higher organizations--until, at last, she gave to man his _inscrutable_ birth! That was, no doubt, a great triumph of power and genius! Man is a noble animal, the finest of all living fellows! _et cetera! et cetera!_ But what sort of a fellow was he when he came, in his spindles and shacklebones, from the womb of the All-mother? Was he a Caucasian, or a Mongolian, a Negro, a Malay, or a Bosjesman?--this last being an effigy of man so abominable that no race that I have heard of will include him even as a lodger in the parish settlements! Mark! what a sameness, and yet what an infinite variety, there is in all the operations and purposes of Nature! She does not grow us _men_ out of our mothers, but babes--helpless, pitiably, tearfully helpless _babes_!--ignorant; who must _grow_ into the perfect stature and the mature mind of men. Is not this babe also a saurian in its little way? Does a wider gap separate the saurian from the man, than that which separates the tiny babe from some Bacon or Raleigh? The law of nature is progress. It is often, nay, always, a very slow thing--but how sure! how inevitable! how beneficent in its results! She never makes worse after bad--and those weird opium monsters of the foreworlds were unspeakably bad!--but always she makes of bad better; and of better she has made her best, at present. In the light of this law, _were any one mad enough to grope_, he might come to the conclusion that the first man (or race of men) was anything but a grandee in mind, person, or estate; and that our seemingly puzzled but at last most wonder-working mother, ycleped Nature, made some very ugly attempts at man before she reached the climax of her imagination and her power as it obtains in the man Caucasian! I regard all the colored races--and with no malice or evil of any sort in my heart toward them--as first experiments in the gamut of human creation. Neither ethnology nor any other ology will pull out of my consciousness--let alone my active intellect--the belief that these were the oldest, the primordial races, or the descendants of such, and that the white Caucasian man, with his noble brain and heart, his matchless person, was an afterthought, the brightest since her birth-thought of the earth's creation. Look into the face of any upgrown modern Indian! It is an _old_ face, as if the accumulated wrinkles of, not 'forty,' but a hundred 'centuries' had ploughed their marks there. They seem to belong to the dawn of time; while our Caucasian man is ever young and beautiful, the born master of all things.