II.
BUT what slaves were the fathers of this free generation? Your
anthropologists, your ethnologists, seem at fault here: the
African traits have become transformed; the African
characteristics have been so modified within little more than two
hundred years—by inter-blending of blood, by habit, by soil and
sun and all those natural powers which shape the mould of races,
—that you may look in vain for verification of ethnological
assertions. … No: the heel does not protrude;—the foot is not
flat, but finely arched;—the extremities are not large;—all the
limbs taper, all the muscles are developed; and prognathism has
become so rare that months of research may not yield a single
striking case of it. … No: this is a special race, peculiar to
the island as are the shapes of its peaks,—a mountain race; and
mountain races are comely. … Compare it with the population of
black Barbadoes, where the apish grossness of African coast types
has been perpetuated unchanged;—and the contrast may well
astonish! …
