dull ashy appearance,
sometimes extracting the whole of it, converting the negro into the
albino. Albinoism or cucosis does not necessarily imply hybridism. It
occurs among the pure Africans from any cause producing a degeneration
of the species. Hybridism, however, is the most prolific source of that
degeneration. Sometimes the degeneration shows itself by white spots,
like the petals of flowers, covering different parts of the skin. The
Mexicans are subject to a similar degeneration, only that the spots and
stripes are black instead of white. It is called the pinto with them.
Even the pigment of the iris and the coloring matter of the albino's
hair is absorbed, giving it a silvery white appearance, and converting
him into a clairvoyant at night. According to Professors Brown, Seidy
and Gibbs, the negro's hair is not tubular, like the white man's, but it
is eccentrically elliptical, with flattened edges, the coloring matter
residing in the epidermis, and not in tubes. In the place of a tube, the
shaft of each hair is surrounded with a scaly covering like sheep's
wool, and, like wool, is capable of being felted. True hair does not
possess that property. The degeneration called albinoism has a
remarkable influence upon the hair, destroying its coarse, nappy, wooly
appearance, and converting it into fine, long, soft, silky, curly
threads. Often, the whole external skin, so remarkably void of hair in
the healthy negro, becomes covered with a very fine, silky down,
scarcely perceptible to the naked eye, when transformed into the albino.

Mr. Bowen, the celebrated Baptist missionary, [see his work entitled
Central Africa and Missionary Labors from 1849 to 1856, by T. J. Bowen,
Charleston, Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1857,] met with a
great many cases of leucosis in Soudan or Negroland, back of Liberia,
and erroneously concluded that these people had very little, if any
negro blood in them, and would be better subjects for missionary labors
than the blacks of the same country. They are, however, nothing but
_white_ black men, a degeneration of the negro proper, and are even less
capable of perpetuating themselves than the hybrids or mulattoes. Mr.
Bowen is at a loss to account for the depopulation, which he verifies
has been going on in Soudan the last fifty years, threatening to leave
the country, at no distant time, bare of inhabitants, unless roads be
constructed by the Christians of the Southern States for comme