they are scattered, from the causes already stated, certainly form a very striking example as regards the uncertainty of perpetuity in color.
Descended from one stock, and prohibited by the most sacred institutions from intermarrying with the people of other nations, and yet dispersed, according to the divine prediction, into every country on the globe, this one people is marked with the colors of all; fair in Briton and Germany; brown in France and in Turkey; swarthy in Portugal and in Spain; olive in Syria and in Chaldea; tawny or copper-colored in Arabia and in Egypt;[1] whilst they are "black at Congo, in Africa."[2]
Let us survey the gradations of color on the continent of Africa itself. The inhabitants of the north are whitest; and as we advance southward towards the line, and those countries in which the sun's rays fall more perpendicularly, the complexion gradually assumes a darker shade. And the same men, whose color has been rendered black by the powerful influence of the sun, if they remove to the north, gradually become whiter (I mean their posterity), and eventually lose their dark color.[3]
The Portuguese who planted themselves on the coast of Africa a few centuries ago, have been succeeded by descendants blacker than many Africans."[4] On the coast of Malabar there are two colonies of Jews, the old colony and the new, separated by color, and known as the "black Jews," and the "white Jews."
