The Africans consider our color quite as great a deformity as we regard theirs. When Andanson entered a village at a little distance from the coast, the children ran away screaming with terror; and it required a great effort to persuade them to approach the white man, and touch his long straight hair. Many of them suppose that the pale color of Europeans is owing to a leprous disease. When Mungo Park was detained at Benown, the king’s wives made him unbutton his waistcoat to show his white skin; and even after they had counted his fingers and toes, to ascertain that he was a human being, they could not refrain from a shudder whenever they approached him. The king’s sons seriously proposed to put out his eyes because they so much resembled a cat. The wives of the Foulah king were more civil to the traveller, but they found his features and color equally disagreeable. Mr. Park says: “As soon as I entered, the whole seraglio surrounded me, some begging for physic, others for amber, and all of them desirous of trying that great African specific, blood-letting. They were ten or twelve in number, most of them young and handsome. They rallied me with a good deal of gayety on different subjects, particularly on the whiteness of my skin and the prominence of my nose. They insisted that both were artificial. The first they said was produced when I was an infant, by dipping me in milk; and they insisted that my nose had been pinched every day till it had acquired its present unsightly and unnatural conformation. Without disputing my own deformity, I paid them many compliments on African beauty. I praised the glossy jet of their skins, and the lovely depression of their noses; but they told me that _honey-mouth_ was not esteemed in Bondu. In return, however, for my company, or my compliments, to which they seemed not to be so insensible as they affected to be, they presented me with a jar of honey and some fish, which were sent to my lodging.” The prejudice with regard to a white skin is not to be wondered at, when we consider that nearly all the intercourse between Europe and Africa has been for the purpose of obtaining slaves; and to this circumstance must be added the natural tendency we all have to admire what we are most accustomed to in our own friends.