Note 167 — Chapter XIX

In our popular works—treasuries of error—every one born in Africa is a “negro.” Thus “God’s Image in Ebony” (London: Partridge and Oakley), offers in two pages (93, 94), as “convincing proofs that the negro is morally and intellectually as well as physically the equal of the white man,” the following jumble of instances: Minerva (a negro princess!), Origen and Athanasius (Alexandrian), Tertullian, Augustine (Numidian), Alexandrinus and Cyril (Moors), Arius (Cyreniac and Semitic speaking), Hannibal (a Phœnician), and Terence (a Roman). Messrs. Adams, Cherson, and Armistead should learn their ethnological alphabet before quoting these as “negro representatives of science, learning, religion, war, and poetry.” The Abbé Gregoire’s examples are mostly mulattoes, as Christophe and Dessalines. The oft-quoted Mr. ex-President Roberts, of Liberia, is an octoroon.