terms in their broadest sense, the gap standing between such a philosopher as Darwin was, for example, and a cannibal of the West African Coast, is as profound a one as the best minds among us can conceive of or demonstrate.
Granting all this we are now in a position to pass upon the mental, moral and physical characters of the negroes and negroids. A just consideration of these will furnish the necessary data to enable us to establish the ethnological status of these people. It must be understood that the negroes I am dealing with are those tribes found in the West Soudan, the Congo Basin, the Slave and Gold coasts of Africa, the stock in fact from which was derived the negroes that were brought to the United States as slaves. These are the negroes, and the descendants of these are of the race or races that interest us here in this country. It is they that we have upon our hands, and it is they that we have to deal with in the condition of affairs widely known as the "negro problem".
The word negro seems to be of Italian and Spanish origin, and is derived, originally from the Latin niger meaning black. Anthropologically, it distinctly characterizes the race of negroes to be described in the present volume,—those of the western Soudan, their true home. All others are of negroid or even sub-negroid blood, and it would appear that the original undiluted stock came from out the land of Lemuria, that hypothetical region now submerged beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean. They were the lands that constituted the cradle of the negro stock. They are found now only in a pure state in the Benua and Shari basins; in the Gaboon; on the coast of Guinea, and
