the most ancient fossils known in Europe. They were the bones of
animals, as hippopotami, water hogs, antelopes, crocodiles, identical
with those now living in the country. These were the primitive fauna of
Africa, and if vitrified iron from the prodigious number of broken
smelting furnaces all over the country was known from the remotest
times, the Africans seem to have had a start in the race, at a time when
our progenitors were grubbing up flints to save a miserable existence by
the game they might kill. Slave-trading seems to have been coeval with
the knowledge of iron. The monuments of Egypt show that this curse has
venerable antiquity. Some people say, "If so ancient, why try to stop
an old established usage now?" Well, some believe that the affliction
that befel the most ancient of all the patriarchs, Job, was small-pox.
Why then stop the ravages of this venerable disease in London and New
York by vaccination?

But no one expects any benevolent efforts from those who cavil and carp
at efforts made by governments and peoples to heal the enormous open
sore of the world. Some profess that they would rather give "their mite"
for the degraded of our own countrymen than to "niggers"! Verily it is
"a mite," and they most often forget, and make a gift of it to
themselves. It is almost an axiom that those who do most for the heathen
abroad are most liberal for the heathen at home. It is to this class we
turn with hope. With others arguments are useless, and the only answer I
care to give is the remark of an English sailor, who, on seeing
slave-traders actually at their occupation, said to his companion,
"Shiver my timbers, mate, if the devil don't catch these fellows, we
might as well have no devil at all."

In conversing with a prince at Johanna, one of the Comoro islands lying
off the north end of Madagascar, he took occasion to extol the wisdom of
the Arabs in keeping strict watch over their wives. On suggesting that
their extreme jealousy made them more like jailers than friends of their
wives, or, indeed, that they thus reduced themselves to the level of the
inferior animals, and each was like the bull of a herd and not like a
reasonable man--"fuguswa"--and that they gave themselves a vast deal of
trouble for very small profit; he asserted that the jealousy was
reasonable because all women were bad, they could not avoid going
astray. And on remarking that this might be the case with Arab women,
but certainly did not