not-human_, associated
with the dark-colored African races of people _now_, were not attached
to them at an early period of their history; and _secondly_, that
while depicted as Negroes, the Egyptians were regarded by these
profound ancients--the one a naturalist and the other a historian--as
one of the branches of the human family, and as identified with a
nation of whose descent from Ham there is no question.[638] Egyptian
antiquity, not claiming priority of social existence for itself, often
pointed to the regions of Habesh, or high African Ethiopia, and
sometimes to the North, for the seat of the gods and demigods, because
both were the intermediate stations of the progenitor tribes.[639]

There is, therefore, every reason to believe that the primitive
Egyptians were conformed much more to the African than to the European
form and physiognomy, and therefore that there was a time when
learning, commerce, arts, manufactures, etc., were all associated with
a form and character of the human race now regarded as the evidence
only of degradation and barbarous ignorance.

But why question this fact when we can refer to the ancient and once
glorious kingdoms of Meroe, Nubia, and Ethiopia, and to the prowess
and skill of other ancient and interior African Nations? And among the
existing nations of interior Africa, there is seen a manifold
diversity as regards the blackest races. The characteristics of the
most truly Negro race are not found in _all_, nor to the same degree
in _many_.

Clapperton and other travellers among the Negro tribes of interior
Africa, attest the superiority of the pure Negroes above the mixed
races around them, in all moral characteristics, and describe also
large and populous kingdoms with numerous towns, well cultivated
fields, and various manufactures, such as weaving, dyeing, tanning,
working in iron and other metals, and in pottery.[640]

From the facts we have adduced it seems to follow, that one of the
earliest races of men of whose existence, civilization and
physiognomy, we have any remaining proofs, were dark or black colored.
"We must," says Prichard, "for the present look upon the black races
as the aborigines of Kelaenonesia, or Oceanica,--that is as the
immemorial and primitive inhabitants. There is no reason to doubt that
they were spread over the Austral island long before the same or the
contiguous regions were approached by the Malayo-Polynesians. We
cannot say definitely how fa