Now, what is the knowledge which the New Negro needs most? He needs above all else a knowledge of the wider world and of the long past. But that is history, modern and ancient: History as written by Herodotus and John Bach McMaster; sociology not as conceived by Giddings, but as presented by Spencer and Ward, and anthropology as worked out by Boas and Thomas. The Negro needs also the knowledge of the best thought; but that is literature as conceived, not as a collection of flowers from the tree of life, but as its garnered fruit. And, finally, the Negro needs a knowledge of his own kind, concerning which we shall have something to say later, And the purposes of this knowledge? They are, to know our place in the human processus, to strengthen our minds by contact with the best and most useful thought-products evolved during the long rise of man from anthropoid to scientist; to inspire our souls and to lift our race industrially, commercially, intellectually to the level of the best that there is in the world about us. For _never until the Negro’s knowledge of nitrates and engineering, of chemistry and agriculture, of history, science and business is on a level, at least, with that of the whites, will the Negro be able to measure arms successfully with them._ CHAPTER IX. A FEW BOOKS. _The Negro in History and Civilization_ (From Superman to Man, by J. A. Rogers.) This volume by Mr. Rogers is the greatest little book on the Negro that we remember to have read. It makes no great parade of being “scientific,” as so many of our young writers do who seem to think that science consists solely in logical analysis. If science consists fundamentally of facts, of information and of principles derived from those facts, then the volume before us is one of the most scientific that has been produced by a Negro writer. It sweeps the circle of all the social sciences. History, sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics and politics—even theology—are laid under contribution and yield a store of information which is worked up into a presentation so plain and clear that the simplest can read and understand it, and yet so fortified by proofs from the greatest standard authorities of the past and present that there is no joint in its armor in which the keenest spear of a white scientist may enter. Unlike an older type of scholar (now almost extinct) the author does not go to vapid verbal philosophers or devotional dreamers for the facts of history and ethnology. He goes to historians and ethnologists for them and to anthropologists for his anthropology. The result is information which stands the searching tests of any inquirer who chooses to doubt and investigate before accepting what is set before him.