Perhaps one of the most unerring indications of the native capacities and tendencies of a race is to be found in its ethnic religion, its mythology, its childlike, untutored attitude towards the riddles of the universe. For there can be but little or no question of outside influence or unequal opportunity. The sun, the moon, the stars, the firmament, the ocean, the plains, the mountains, the forests, the rivers, the seasons, eclipses and precessions, day and night, morning and evening, fire and frost, ice and vapour, wind and cloud, thunder and lightning, life and death, health and disease, dreams and shadows—all these multiform materials of construction have offered themselves in practically equivalent quantity and quality to the phantasy of every race and every age. The reactions have varied widely, and have boldly characterized the genius of each people. Tell me of their gods, and I will tell you of the worshippers. Tried by this standard, the case seems decided, even before it reaches the threshold of the court. For, putting aside the sublime and awful monotheism of the Hebrew, can any one for an instant set in line the august and imposing, if overgrown and superluxuriant, mythology of India, the stern and severe and tremendous religions of the Nile and the Euphrates, the sad and solemn but high-hearted and deep-thoughted musings of Scandinavia and Teuton-land, the infinitely varied and infinitely beautiful mythopœia of Hellas, or even the colorless but sharp-lined abstractions of Italy, with the degraded fetichism, the stock-and stone-service of the Niger and the Congo? 

 What we may call the historical argument, just presented, finds strong and decisive confirmation, even though it needs none, in the craniology, the physiognomy, and the general anatomy of the Negro.   [7]  Take him at his very best—does any one believe that the Olympian Zeus, an Apollo Belvedere, a Melian Venus, a Capitoline Juno, a Hermes of Praxiteles, or a Sistine Madonna could ever by any possibility have emerged from the most fertile fancy of an "Old Master" of the Congo? Perfect his type as you will, even as you perfect the type of a flower or a bird, does not the Sudanese remain at immense remove from the European? Of course, it is always possible to contend that beauty is only subjective, any way, that the hair and brow and nose and lips and jaw and ear of the West African would be just as beautiful as those of the Greek or Anglo-American, if we only thought so. But being what we are, we cannot think so now and still less the further we advance in organic development. Moreover, with equal reason we might say that the tiger-lily was as beautiful as the rose, the hippopotamus as pretty as the squirrel; nay more, 

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