![Transcription Center logo](/themes/custom/tc_theme/assets/image/logo.png)
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
172 quently meet with persons who have been taken captive in infancy from Anglo-American families, and grown up in the habits of savage life. These descendents of the fairest Europeans universally contract such a resemblance of the natives, in their countenance, and even in their complexion, as not to be easily distinguished from them; and afford a striking proof that the differences in physiognomy, between the Anglo-American, and the indian depend principally on the state of society.* * The resemblance between these captives and the native savages is so strong as sensibly to strike every observer. Being taken in infancy, before the ideas and habits of civilized society could have made any deep impressions upon them, and spending that tender and forming age in the solitude and rudeness of savage life, they grow up with the same apathy of countenance, the same lugubrious wildness, the same swelling of the features and muscles of the face, the same form and attitude of the limbs, and the same characteristic gait, which is a great elevation of the feet, with the toe somewhat turned in. Exposed without covering, to the constant action of the sun, and of the weather, amidst all the hardships of the savage state, their colour tends to a coppery brown. - This example affords another proof of the greater ease with which a dark colour may be stained on a skin originally fair, than effaced from it. The causes of colour are active in their operation, and, entering into the substance of the skin, soon make a durable impression. White is the original ground on which this operation is received. And the whiteness of the skin is to be preserved only by 173 The College of New-Jersey, a few years ago, furnished a counterpart to this example. A young indian, about the age of fifteen, who had been brought from his nation five or six years before, was studying the latin and greek languages in the institution. carefully protecting it from the actions of these causes. Protection has merely a negative influence: applied, therefore, to a skin already discoloured, it will be slow in producing any change toward white as long as the smallest degree of positive agency is suffered from the original causes of discolouration. And, as the skin retains with great constancy impressions once received into its substance, all the dark shades of the complexion will be very long retained. That period of time, therefore, which would be sufficient, in a savage state, to change a fair complexion, to the darkest hue which the climate can impress, would hardly remove one shade from a black colour. Unless, then, the climate be such as to operate very great changes on the internal constitution of the body, and to alter the whole state of the secretions, as well as to defend it from the fervid action of the sun, the negro colour may, by the exposure and hardships of a poor and servile condition, be rendered perpetual. In what page of the essay has a certain annotator in the edition of Rees' Cyclopædia published by Bradford & Co. in Philadelphia, found it asserted, that the negro complexion has hitherto become sensibly lighter in America? If he has any candor, and possesses, in any degree, the information which ought to distinguish a man who presumes to be an annotator on that work, he will be ashamed of the indiscretion and incorrectness, to give them the softest names they will bear, of some of his remarks under the title, Complexion.