Leadenhall carcase butchers, there was just one
specimen, bred in Aberdeenshire and fed in
Forfarshire. This is the kind of cattle that will
bear the bell at the forthcoming Christmas
Cattle Show.

STORIES OF THE BLACK MEN.

THERE is a wide truth no doubt in the old
proverb, that every sort of wood cannot be
shaped into a Mercury. It will be a capital
thing to civilise Africa, and fetching out the
black from the mind, if not from the skin,
come at the negro Dante, or Shakespeare; the
negro Raffaelle, or Beethoven; Luther, or
Newton. If, however, the Africans south of the
equator represent mankind in the same sort of
block out of which Europeans have been cut,
chiselled, and polished, search must be made
for the hammers and chisels used in that
successful operation; for existing tools are only
broken on the lump that yet waits fashioning.
A new volume—the first of a new series—of the
Transactions of the Ethnological Society has
just appeared, containing three lectures
delivered on different evenings by three African
travellers—Mr. du Chaillu, Captain Burton, and
Mr. Hutchinson—wherein they compare notes
and gossip pleasantly over the things they have
seen. We proceed to pound down the three
lectures into small talk.

As men whose talk is of the smallest
generally set out with the largest pretension, we
will begin as if we were proposing to set forth
the whole history and geography of Africa. This
vast continent is nearly five thousand miles in
length, and above four thousand five hundred in
breadth. Its area is estimated at thirteen
millions four hundred and thirty thousand square
miles, and it is inhabited by a hundred and fifty
millions of people, chiefly Moors, Arabs, and
Negroes, with, in these days, many mulattoes.
The mixture of races is most evident among the
Felatahs, who occupy ground extending from
the deserts of Sahara, in the north, to the Kong
mountains in the south; from the sea and the
mouths of the Senegal and Gambia rivers, in the
west, to the kingdoms of Bornu and Mandara
in the east—a space equal to a fourth part of
Europe, or a tenth of Africa. And here, thinks
Mr. Hutchinson, we may fit fracture into fracture
and see where a part of the European chip
has not been joined to a part of the African
block. For from the tribes of Felatahs in
Central Africa he has brought iron spearheads
with wooden shafts, heads of javelins, arrows,
double-edged swords, knives, ornamental beads,
pottery ware for the cook's uses—exactly similar
in pattern to such articles dug up at Canterbury,
and held to be relics of the pagan time in
Britain. Their rude manufacture, with double-
handed bellows and the handleless hammer,
still yields an iron so tough that the best blades
they see from Sheffield they call "rotten iron,"
because they will chip and break.

Africa contains civilised negroes. The
language of all the negro races is, indeed, unwritten,
but in Monrovia, capital of the negro republic
Liberia, there are many natives who can read
and write. To the commander of an English
man-of-war, for example, when he entered the
harbour, this letter was delivered by a boat that
put off from shore expressly to bring it:

"GENTLEMEN OF THE MAN-OF-WAR,—I shall
be happy to see you on shore.   Mrs. H. sends
her love, and will' be happy to wash your clothes.
I have the honour to be, gentlemen, yours
affectionately, J. H., Colonel of the Liberian Militia."
But, on the whole, this high degree of civilisation
is not frequently attained. On some parts
of the western coast it is believed (contact with
white men having bred the story) that the
Maker of the world—they have nowhere a
distinct name for God—in dry regions the word
that serves for it is often the word meaning
rain—the Maker of the world created one pair of
blacks and one of whites. To the blacks, being
the favourites, choice was offered between two
gifts—a closed box and a closed letter. Because
it was bigger and heavier, they took the box
and found in it only some old metals. To the
whites was left the letter, and that told them
everything, where to go and live, how to build
ships, make cloth, and, above all, how to make
those three chief glories of civilisation—guns,
and powder, and rum.

After much Christian teaching and domestication
among Christians, the native African wit
acquires but shallow notions of religion. A
clever Kruman servant of Mr. and Mrs.
Hutchinson, at Fernando Po, being questioned as to
his knowledge of sacred things, &c., said he
knew God very well, that He was very good,
and had made two very fine things: "Mammy,
dem two ting be foine past what any man can
make. One ting be shleep—foine, foine ting,
mammy, no man fit to make dat; and t'other
ting be Sunday, when no pusson have for
work."

The notion of a Deity held by an African
negro on his own soil is utterly rudimentary.
It wants, as we have said, even a name. There
is the Mulunga of some tribes, the Uhlunga of
the Caffres, and the Utita of the Hottentots,
for whom a house may be built and food set in
a village. But the idea is of a vague ghost,
without personality or character, and the name
may mean also the firmament or the sun. With
another tribe, as we said, God and rain are
synonymous, and in another the word is the
word for witchcraft. Of the suggestion of death
there is everywhere extreme dread, though it
may be blindly and fearlessly risked. "He is
finished," say the East Africans of a dead
relative. "All is done for ever," say the West
African. In Bonny, European intercourse has
suggested the phrase, "he is gone for devilly."
Food is set by the grave, and, in the case of a
chief, slaves are killed, for sustenance and
companionship on the way to the spirit world; and
for some weeks, perhaps a few years after a
death, the place of burial is dreaded, because
the ghost of the dead, always held to be vindictive,
is supposed to haunt it. A village has