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Their hair, at the same time, is injured by daubing it, constantly, with the vilest compositions. Yet, against all their efforts, the climate, although it is but a few degrees declined from the torrid zone, visibly prevails. Their hair is thicker and longer than that of the negroes, and their complexion, as they approach the southern point of the peninsula, becomes of the light case of the Caffre.*

But the phenomenon which principally merits our attention in the African zone is the Abyssinian person and complexion. We find in this Alpine region, and between the ninth and fifteenth degrees from the equator, a race of men resembling the southern Arabians, only of a darker due, as they lie nearer to the sun, but extremely dissimilar from the negroes on the West coast. Their hair is long and straight, their features tolerably regular, and their complexion a very dark olive, approaching to black. --- This deviation from the general law of that zone is explained, according to the principles already

[[note]]
*Many peculiarities have been related of these people with regard to their figure and appearance, by careless voyagers, which are either wholly false, or very greatly exaggerated. If we were to trust such narrations, we should suppose them to be hardly distinguishable from certain classes of the brute creation. 

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laid down, from their position on the continent, in the vicinity of the great Indian or Arabian ocean, and from the elevated and mountainous face of the country, rising at a medium, at least, two miles above the level of the sea,* and, at this great elevation, covered with clouds, and drenched by almost incessant deluges of rain during one half of the year.† --- This altitude of the general face of the country in Abyssinia raises it to a region of the atmosphere which is equivalent, in its temperature, to several degrees of northern latitude. Thus, the partial civilization of the people, the elevation of the face of the country, the temperature of the tropical winds coming from the Arabian ocean, and the canopy of the clouds, and the incessant rains which prevail during that season of the year in which the sun is

[[note]]
* Philosophers who have visited that country inform us that the mercury in the barometer does not rise there, on an average, more than twenty inches, which corresponds to the altitude of about two miles above the level of the sea.

† The periodical rains in Abyssinia are now known to be the cause of the overflowing of the Nile. And as the extent of this deluge demonstrates the prodigious quantities of rain which fall in that mountainous region during five or six months in the year, so the length of the river issuing from those mountains, affords a new proof of their great elevation. 
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