plant, which no other operatives but themselves can cultivate
without sacrificing ease, comfort, health and life, affords a cheap
material, in sufficient abundance, to clothe the naked of the whole
world. Even the little scientific knowledge heretofore acquired
concerning them, has been so far forgotten, that when I enumerated a few
of their anatomical and physical peculiarities, well known to the
medical men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I was supposed
by some of my cotemporaries in the South to be broaching novelties and
advancing speculations wild and crude. But I would not be understood as
underrating the editors of the _Charleston Medical Journal_ and some
other Southern writers, for mistaking anatomical facts for wild
speculations, and condemning them as such in their editorial apologies
for not publishing the same. The fault lies not with them, but in that
system of education which seems intended to keep physicians, divines,
and all other classes of men in Egyptian darkness of every thing
pertaining to the philosophy of the negro constitution. It is only the
country and village practitioners of the Southern States (among
professional men,) who appear to know any thing at all about the
peculiar nature of negroes--having derived their knowledge, not from
books or schools, but in the field of experience. It is the latter class
of medical men, by far the most numerous in the South, who have with
great unanimity sustained my feeble efforts to make the negro's peculiar
nature known, and the important fact that he consumes less oxygen than
the white man. Until his defective haematosis be made an element in
calculating the best means for improving the negro's condition, our
Northern people ought not to wonder at finding their colored population,
born to freedom by the side of the church and school-house door, in a
lower species of degradation, after trying for half a century or more to
elevate them, than an equal number of slaves any where to be found in
the South. "Will not a lover of natural history," says Mr. Jefferson,
"one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye
of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those of the department of man
as distinct as nature formed them?" But no effort has since been made to
draw the distinctions between the black and the white races by the knife
of the anatomist, but much false logic has been introduced into our
books and schools, to argue down the