That fine North American race, which is so much admired by all who have lived among them, will be no longer, according to Dr. Martius,[194] the worthy descendant of the first murderer, a collection of maniacs and insane folks, brought to that state by misery and the reprobation of God. We only see in them men endowed like ourselves, but more in harmony with the nature which animates them, having, of course, their imperfections like ourselves, but giving us also an example of great qualities, firmness, courage, patience, and an intense love of liberty. Whites and blacks may be slaves, but the American has never served a master.[195] The Negro himself has his advantages; and we could not, perhaps, struggle with him about affective or hateful faculties. M. de Gobineau seems to us to be strangely mistaken in the portrait which he has attempted to draw of the black man; he has made his race hideous; it is only inferior _in relation to ourselves_; it is equal to some, and superior to others, not partaking, indeed, of all the advantages of the Iranian or Semitic races, but able to display other qualities which belong particularly to itself. In the place of this spectacle, which is thus presented to our view, of degraded beings covering half the earth, we simply see, for our part, intelligence developing itself in each race, following certain directions and tendencies at the expense of others. These special tendencies are sometimes very remarkable. In his intercourse with the Esquimaux, Sir John Ross, whose observing mind we have several times had occasion to notice, found that they were nearly all good geographers. He put into their hands a pencil and paper (of the use of which they were certainly ignorant), and they drew with great correctness the bays, rivers, islands, and lakes of their country, as well as the exact spots where they had encamped at some former emigration. This is a curious contrast with most of the African and Arab peoples, who seem to have but a very vague idea of distance or time; indeed, the difficulty of finding out routes among the inhabitants of Soudan, which we have ourselves experienced, has become almost proverbial.[196] Without going so far as all that, our neighbours, the Semites, differ from ourselves in the manner and quality of their mind to an extraordinary degree; on the one side is the Aryan, an analyst, a pantheist, given to the plastic or perspective reproduction of everything which surrounds him; on the other, the Semite, a sensualist, a monotheist, an iconoclast. If it is radically impossible for the Semite to follow us in the depths of metaphysics, his language even being opposed to all philosophic demonstration; in our turn, perhaps, we are less religious,--that is to say, less solemnly struck by the universe. The thought of demonstrating God, and proving this thought, will never come to the Semite as it did to Bossuet, Fénélon, and Newton.[197] The Semite feels God, if we may