written history, the negro variety of mankind is placed within the pale of civilization, with the chances of becoming part and parcel thereof. Shall bolts and bars affixed to the temples of learning, shall frowns and scorn written upon the faces of our proud fellow men, shall the infirmities stamped upon us by the influences of a less favorable clime, or the horrible endurance of two centuries of servitude—shall these or twenty such impediments, crush our energies or pale our hopes? No.
Let us toil on, then, and with hope. Away down in the depths of ocean, scarcely reached by the light of the sun, the coral insect toils on through years on years; the insect perishes, but its labors live, and pile on pile, its tiny successors continually lay, whilst the years roll on. At length, uncounted ages having glided by, the tiny laborers reach the surface of the sea; the waves joyfully caress the visitant, and the birds of the air rest their weary wings in the same, and air and ocean bring their offerings to the successful laborer; at length the ships of the sea come, and find a refuge from the tempest; men erect their dwellings, society is organized, and the Great Father of all is glorified;—and all this has come from the noiseless, persevering toil of the little laborer, only gifted with instinct, in the depths of the ocean. In what are called the Dark Ages, when the ocean of ignorance and superstition, dammed up by the iron walls of caste, kept the human mind stagnant, unmoved, there were, here and there in stony cells, hundreds of monks, who plied their unwearied pens in transcribing and illuminating with fantastic figures, the lore of Ancient Greece and Rome. Long years rolled by, and from the humble toil of theirs, the glory of modern letters and the light of modern science have arisen.
Higher, far higher than the labor of the coral, loftier than the toil of the monks, is the work allotted to the man of color in these United States; like them he is doomed to toil, but he toils with a reward constantly in his grasp, with the glorious result full in his view; he knows that the progress of mankind is intrusted to his keeping, and he toils for the advent of that time of 'blissful tranquility' for the race, 'when the spiritual shall become regnant over the carnal.'
THE ATTRACTION OF PLANETS.
BY M. R. DELANEY.
Many, even among persons of intelligence and scientific attainments, entertain the apprehension of a 'clashing of worlds,' or the contact of ours with some other planet. This is a physical impossibility, according to the laws of nature. And though in truth it may be said that theory on the heavenly bodies is merely conjectural, yet the simple observance of a scientific fact, will prove the fallacy of the premise.
There is a law essential to matter, of mutual attraction and repulsion, which would seem to depend on the spherical shape of bodies. The ultimate particles of all matter being spherical, different substances, differing in their power of attraction, present this property in different degrees, and apparently under different circumstances—the larger the body, the greater the powers of attraction and repulsion, which has properly been attributed to the presence of electricity, demonstrated by isolated bodies, in opposite states of electrical influence, positive and negative.
Why this is so, is a question no more to be answered satisfactorily, than to explain the cause of the projecting rays of the sun. Yet it will not be denied that the rays of the sun are known to a certainty to project, because we both see and feel their effects and influence on everything around us.
