Travels in the United States of America: Commencing in the Year 1793, and Ending in 1797. With the Author's Journals of his Two Voyages Across the Atlantic.Priest, William
History
Travels in the United States of America: Commencing in the Year 1793, and Ending in 1797. With the Author's Journals of his Two Voyages Across the Atlantic.
Priest, William
United States -- Description and travel
"The first difference that strikes us is colour. Whether the black of the
negro reside in the reticular membrane, between the skin and scarf skin,
or in the scarf skin itself; whether it proceed from the colour of the
blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the
difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if it's seat and cause
were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it
not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races?
Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expression of every
passion by a greater or less suffusion of colour in the one, preferable to
that eternal monotony, that immovable veil of black, which covers all the
emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant
symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by
their preference to them, as uniformly as is the preference of the
oroonowtang for the black women over those of his own species? The
circumstance of superiour beauty is thought worthy attention in the
propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in
that of man?
"Beside those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical
distinctions, proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the
face and body. They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of
the skin; which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This
greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and
less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps a difference of structure in the
pulmonary aparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist, (Crawford) has
discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled
them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid
from the outer air; or obliged them, in expiration, to part with more of
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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