to Negro genius and civilization, and more ancient than the
cities of the Delta,--until Greece and Rome stood transfixed before
the ancient glory of Ethiopia! Homeric mythology borrowed its very
essence from Negro hieroglyphics; Egypt borrowed her light from the
venerable Negroes up the Nile. Greece went to school to the Egyptians,
and Rome turned to Greece for law and the science of warfare. England
dug down into Rome twenty centuries to learn to build and plant, to
establish a government, and maintain it. Thus the flow of civilization
has been from the East--the place of light--to the West; from the
Oriental to the Occidental. (God fixed the mountains east and west in
Europe.)

"Tradition universally represents the earliest men
descending, it is true, from the high table-lands of this
continent; but it is in the low and fertile plains lying at
their feet, with which we are already acquainted, that they
unite themselves for the first time in natural bodies, in
tribes, with fixed habitations, devoting themselves to
husbandry, building cities, cultivating the arts,--in a
word, forming well-regulated societies. The traditions of
the Chinese place the first progenitors of that people on
the high table-land, whence the great rivers flow: they mike
them advance, station by station as far as the shores of the
ocean. The people of the Brahmins come down from the regions
of the Hindo-Khu, and from Cashmere, into the plains of the
Indus and the Ganges; Assyria and Bactriana receive their
inhabitants from the table-lands of Armenia and Persia.

"These alluvial plains, watered by their twin rivers, were
better formed than all other countries of the globe to
render the first steps of man, an infant still, easy in the
career of civilized life. A rich soil, on which overflowing
rivers spread every year a fruitful loam, as in Egypt, and
one where the plough is almost useless, so movable and so
easily tilled is it, a warm climate, finally, secure to the
inhabitants of these fortunate regions plentiful harvests in
return for light labor. Nevertheless, the conflict with the
river itself and with the desert,--which, on the banks of
the Euphrates, as on those of the Nile and the Indus, is
ever threatening to invade the cultivated lands,--the
necessity of irrigation, the inconstancy of the seasons,