ably no regular slave
routes across the desert. Owing to the activity of European consuls in
Northwest Africa caravans have a precarious existence and no safe
markets.

"Only a few years ago," says the _Anti-slavery Reporter_, "Timbuctu,
the famous trade metropolis of Central Africa, was also the most
active center of the slave trade. French occupation (1894) has put an
end to that traffic, and it is extending the _pax Gallica_ throughout
the vast and fertile territory of the Niger where formerly anarchy and
brutality reigned."[14]

JEROME DOWD,

_Professor in the University of Oklahoma._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Nieboer, "Slavery as an Industrial System," 257-348.

[2] "The Ewe Speaking Peoples," 222.

[3] "Historical Researches," 181.

[4] "Narrative of an American Sailor," 55.

[5] "Travels in North and Central Africa," II, 379.

[6] "Reise von Mittelmeer nach dem Tshad-See," I, 344.

[7] "Travels Through the Interior of Africa," 490.

[8] "An Account of the Empire of Morocco," 282.

[9] _Ibid._, 288.

[10] "Account of the Empire of Morocco," 292.

[11] _Ibid._, 295.

[12] "Le Grand Desert," 228.

[13] _Ibid._, 251.

[14] "Tunesia and the Modern Barbary Pirates," 65.

THE NEGRO IN THE FIELD OF INVENTION

There is no branch of technical and scientific industry in our country
that is at all comparable in scope and results with the business of
perfecting inventions. These constitute the basis on which nearly all
our great manufacturing enterprises are conducted, both as to the
machinery employed and the articles produced. So vast is the field
covered by inventors, and so industriously do they apply their talent
to it that patents for new and useful inventions are now being granted
them by our government at the rate of more than one hundred a day for
every day that the office is open for business. And when one considers
the enormous part played by American inventors in the economic,
industrial and financial development of our country, it becomes a
matter of importance to ascertain what share in this great work is
done by the American Negro.

The average American seems not to know that the Negro has contributed
very materially to this result. Not knowing it, he does not believe
it, and not believing it he easily advances to the mental attitude of
being ready to assert that the Negro has done absolutely nothing worth
while in the field of invention. This c