H. L. Mencken once remarked that the most costly of all follies, which he viewed as the chief occupation of mankind, is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. The aphorism applies with special force to the Negrophile social anthropologists who are so passionately determined to propound that which is palpably not true, or at least palpably not demonstrable, that in their zeal of advocacy they lose all sense of proportion. Thus, in their raptures, the most primitive mud-hut cultures of the Congo must be praised for their “sophistication” and “complexity.” Crude works of art tend to be equated with the sculpture of Periclean Athens. In the rhythmic thump of an African tom-tom, they find black Beethovens at work. Miss Benedict, in _Race: Science and Politics_, is fairly transported. Her technicolor illusions of African history produce “great kingdoms of wealth and splendor ... great political leaders ... men of wealth ... the spread of higher culture.” In seventeenth-century Nigeria, she sees “prized cultural achievements,” and of these African tribes she girlishly cries that “their elaborate and ceremonious political organization, the pomp of their courts, the activity of their far-flung economic life, with its great market centers and tribute collected over great areas, their legal systems with formal trial of the accused, with witnesses and with prosecutors--all these excite the admiration of any student.” Well, one is reminded of Mark Twain’s comment that there is something fascinating about science: “One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” Let it be granted that there is much of archeological and anthropological interest to be found in the obscure and sketchy “histories” of various African kingdoms and empires. One might wish, abstractly, to know more of the Ghana Empire, the Almoravid Empire, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire; the teachers and the curriculum and the libraries of the Universities of Timbuktu and Sakoré might usefully be contrasted with those of the Universities of Paris and Bologna; we should like standard reference works that offered full and scholarly expositions of the kingdom Miss Benedict terms the “culmination” of African civilization, the “great empire of Bornu.” It is an empire not even mentioned by Herskovits in _The Myth of the Negro Past_ and barely touched upon by J. D. DeGraft Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois in their works on African civilization. (DuBois does say that Bornu, a Northern Nigerian kingdom, had in the tenth century a civilization that “would appear to compare favorably with that of European monarchs of that day.” It is an assessment that leaves very little to the Carolingians, and it is the sort of tossed-off grandiloquence of the Negrophile propagandist that leaves the ordinary student more mystified than informed.)