Father. But in order to understand what we mean by the terms reason and instinct, I think three things may be mentioned, in which the difference very distinctly appears.

Richard. What are they, papa ?

Father. Let us first, to bring the parties as nearly on a level as possible, consider man in a savage state, wholly occupied, like the beasts of the field, in providing for the wants of his animal nature; and here the first distinction that appears between him and the creatures around him, is the use of implements.

Richard. Ah, I should never have thought of that.

Father. When the savage provides himself with a hut, or a crawl, or a wigwam, for shelter, or that he may store up his provision, he does no more than is done by the rabbit, the beaver, the bee, and birds of every species. But the man cannot make any progress in this work without something like tools, however rude and simple in their form; he must provide himself with an axe, even before he can lop down a tree for its timber; whereas these animals form their burrows, their cells or their nests, with the most mathematical nicety, with no other tools than those with which nature has provided them. In cultivating the ground, also, man can do nothing without a spade or a plough; nor can he reap what he has sown, till he has shaped an instrument with which to cut down his harvests. But the animals provide for themselves and their young without any of these things.

Edward. Then, here again, the animals are the best off. Father. That is not our present inquiry; now for the second distinction: Man, in all his operations, makes mistakes; animals make none.

Edward. Do animals never make mistakes?

Father. Why, Edward, did you ever see such a thing, or hear of such a thing, as a little bird sitting disconsolate on a twig, lamenting over her half-finished nest, and puzzling her little poll to know how to complete it? Did you ever see the cells of a bee-hive in clumsy, irregular shapes, or observe any thing like a discussion in the little community, as if there was a difference of opinion amongst the architects?

The boys laughed, and owned they had never heard of such a thing.

Father. Animals are even better physicians than we

are, for when they are ill, they will, many of them, seek out some particular herb, which they do not use as food, and which possesses a medicinal quality exactly suited to the complaint. Whereas the whole college of physicians will dispute for a century, and not at last agree, upon the virtues of a single drug. Man undertakes nothing in which he is not, more or less, puzzled; he must try numberless experiments before he can bring his undertakings to any thing like perfection; and these experiments imply a succession of mistakes. Even the simplest operations of domestic life are not well performed without some experience; and the term of man's life is half wasted before he has done with his mistakes, and begins to profit by his lessons.

Edward. Then, papa, how is it? for, after all, we are better than animals.

Father. Observe, then, our third distinction, which is, that animals make no improvements; while the knowledge, and the skill, and the success of man are perpetually on the increase. The inventions and discoveries of one generation are, through the. medium of literature, handed down to succeeding ones; so that the accumulated experience of all former ages and nations is ready for our use, before we begin to think and act for ourselves. The result of which is, that the most learned and ingenious amongst the ancient philosophers, Aristotle or Archimedes, might learn, in an hour, from a modern school-boy, more than the laborious study of their lives could enable them to discover.

Richard. Well, I am glad we have thought of something, at last, to prove that men are wiser than rabbits.

Father. Herein appears the difference between what we call instinct and reason. Animals, in all their operations, follow the first impulse of nature, or that invariable law which God has implanted in them. In all they do undertake, therefore, their works are more perfect and regular than those of men. But man having been endowed with the faculty of thinking or reasoning about what he does, although (being an imperfect and fallible creature) this liberty exposes him to mistake, and is perpetually leading him into error, yet, by patience, perseverance and industry, and by long experience, he at last achieves what angels may, perhaps, behold with admiration. A bird's nest is, indeed, a perfect and beautiful structure; yet the

nest of a swallow of the nineteenth century is not at all more commodious or elegant than those that were built amid the rafters of Noah's ark. But if we compare,-I will not say Adam's bower, for that was doubtless in the finest style of nature's own architecture,—but if we compare the wigwam of the North American Indian, with the temples and palaces of ancient Greece and Rome, we then shall see to what man's mistakes, rectified and improved upon, conduct him. Animals can provide for their wants, and for those of their offspring, with the utmost adroitness; and just so much, and no more, did their antediluvian ancestry; while man, after having provided for his first necessities, emerging gradually from the savage state, begins to cultivate poetry and music, proceeds to the knowledge of arts and sciences, unknown and unthought of by his rude forefathers, till (in humble imitation of the works of God himself) he gives exquisite construction to the rudest materials which nature has left for his use; supplying those artificial wants and wishes, for which it was beneath her dignity to provide; and, while his hand thus executes all that is ingenious and beautiful, his thought glances at all that is magnificent and sublime.

LESSON LXXXV.

Equality of the African Race.-ALEXANDER H. EVERETT.

WE are sometimes told that the African is a degraded member of the human family,—that a man with a dark skin and curled hair is, necessarily, as such, incapable of improvement and civilization, and condemned, by the vice of his physical conformation, to vegetate forever in a state of hopeless barbarism. I reject, with contempt and indignation, this miserable heresy. In replying to it, the friends of truth and humanity have not hitherto done justice to the argument. In order to prove that the blacks were capable of intellectual efforts, they have painfully collected a few imperfect specimens of what some of them have done in this way, even in the degraded condition which they occupy at present in Christendom. This is not the way to treat the subject. Go back to an earlier period in the history of our race.

See what the blacks were, and what they did, three thousand years ago, in the period of their greatness and glory, when they occupied the fore front in the march of civilization, when they constituted, in fact, the whole civilized world of their time. Trace this very civilization, of which we are so proud, to its origin, and see where you will find it. We received it from our European ancestors: they had it from the Greeks and Romans, and the Jews. But where did the Greeks, the Romans and the Jews get it? They derived it from Ethiopia and Egypt,-in one word-from Africa. Moses, we are told, was instructed in all the learning of the Egyptians. The founders of the principal Grecian cities-such as Athens, Thebes and Delphi-came from Egypt, and, for centuries afterwards, their descendants returned to that country, as the source and centre of civilization.

There it was that the generous and stirring spirits of the time-Herodotus, Homer, Plato, Pythagoras, and the rest-made their noble voyages of intellectual and moral discovery, as ours now make them in England, France, Germany and Italy. The Egyptians were the masters of the Greeks and Jews, and consequently of all the modern nations, in civilization; and they had carried it very nearly as far-in some respects, perhaps, a good deal farther-than any subsequent people. The ruins of the Egyptian temples laugh to scorn the architectural monuments of any other part of the world. They will be, what they are now, the delight and admiration of travellers from all quarters, when the grass is growing on the sites of St. Peter's and St. Paul's, the present pride of Rome and London.

Well, who were the Egyptians? They were Africans. And of what race? It is sometimes pretended that, though Africans, and of Ethiopian extraction, they were not black. But what says the father of history-who had travelled among them, and knew their appearance as well as we know that of our neighbors in Canada? Herodotus tells you that the Egyptians were blacks, with curled hair. Some writers have undertaken to dispute his authority, but I cannot bring myself to believe that the father of history did not know black from white. It seems, therefore, that, for this very civilization, of which we are so proud, and which is the only ground of our present claim

of superiority, we are indebted to the ancestors of these very blacks, whom we are pleased to consider as naturally incapable of civilization.

So much for the supposed inferiority of the colored race, and their incapacity to make any progress in civilization and improvement. And it is worth while to remark, that the prejudice which is commonly entertained in this country, but which does not exist to any thing like the same extent in Europe, against the color of the blacks, seems to have grown out of the unnatural position which they Occupy among us. At the period to which I just alluded, when the blacks took precedence of the whites in civilization, science and political power, no such prejudice appears to have existed. The early Greek writers speak of the Ethiopians and Egyptians as a superior variety of the species: superior, not merely in intellectual and moral qualities, but, what may seem to be much more remarkable, in outward appearance.

The Ethiopians, says Herodotus, excel all other nations in longevity, stature and personal beauty. The black prince, Memnon, who served among the Trojan auxiliaries at the siege of Troy (probably an Egyptian prince), is constantly spoken of by the Greek and Latin writers, as a person of extraordinary beauty, and is qualified as the son of Aurora, or the Morning. There are, in short, no traces of any prejudice whatever against the color of the blacks, like that which has grown up in modern times, and which is obviously the result of the relative condition of the two

races.

This prejudice forms, at present, as was correctly observed by president Madison, in one of his speeches in the late Virginia convention, the chief obstacle to the practical improvement of the condition of that portion of them who reside in this country. If they were of the same race with ourselves, the process of emancipation would be rapid, and almost imperceptible, as happened in Europe, when the mass of the population passed, in the course of two or three centuries, from a state of villenage to that of personal independence, with so little trouble or commotion, that there are scarcely traces enough left, in the history of the times, to inform us of the means by which the change was immediately accomplished.