Africa and its people are still among the mysteries that await solution in the developments of divine Providence. It is singular that one of the old continents should have been, except on its northern coast, as recent a discovery as that called the New World; and should even now be the least known portion of the habitable globe; affording to geographical explorers, in the great blanks of its immense interior, fields for their most daring enterprises.

How great, for example, and extraordinary, the ignorance that prevailed, till a recent period, concerning the river Niger. It flowed east, it flowed west; was the source of the Nile, of the Senegal, of the Congo; was lost in the sands, or in an immense marsh. So many impossible theories led wise men to doubt its existence; and all these absurdities were exhibited on maps of the highest name within the last half century; while the ships of Europe were trading in its outlets, in the Bights of Benin and Biafra.

The prolonged barbarism of the African race is also singular, when we remember the early civilization, and high attainments in arts and arms, of Egypt and Carthage. How should it have fallen so far behind the nations of Europe and Asia? Are the children of Ethiopia, indeed, the lineal descendants of Ham, inheriting the malediction of the patriarch of the ark? Did they flee from the face of their brethren to the remotest wilds of their sun-burned inheritance, hoping by separation to escape the curse?