Savagery is evidently the primitive condition of man. But while for certain races it has only been the first period of a more or less rapid progressive evolution, a movement in advance more or less complete, for others it seems to be a perpetual infancy, an incurable atrophy of the noble faculties which are the privilege of our species. It is not the province of the present writer to determine the causes, undoubtedly very complex, which have operated in the formation of the various races composing the human genus, to allot to each the physiological and psychological characteristics which distinguish them, and to explain their distribution in the different regions of the globe. These are problems, indeed, which science has only begun to investigate, and in whose discussion scientific men exhibit the widest discrepancies of opinion. While one authority contends for man's unity of origin, another believes that he has sprung from several independent sources. All at present is hypothesis and conjecture; nor do there apparently exist any well-approved facts on which a satisfactory theory can be erected apart from the brief and succinct details recorded in Holy Writ. Why one race has emerged from barbarism while another remains sunk in its lowest depths, we can only explain by admitting the exercise of a superhuman power. No evidence can be given that any people has achieved civilization by its own unassisted efforts. But in these pages I am not called upon to enter into any philosophical speculations. I have only to deal with facts; and with one incontestable fact, the superiority of those races which have acquired civilization over those which are incapable of so grand a work, and which show little, if any, aptitude to profit by the examples and the lessons brought within their reach.