Chapter II

But what slaves were the fathers of this free generation? Your anthropologists, your ethnologists, seem at fault here: the African traits have become transformed; the African characteristics have been so modified within little more than two hundred years--by interblending of blood, by habit, by soil and sun and all those natural powers which shape the mould of races,--that you may look in vain for verification of ethnological assertions.... No: the heel does _not_ protrude;--the foot is _not_ flat, but finely arched;--the extremities are not large;--all the limbs taper, all the muscles are developed; and prognathism has become so rare that months of research may not yield a single striking case of it.... No: this is a special race, peculiar to the island as are the shapes of its peaks,--a mountain race; and mountain races are comely.... Compare it with the population of black Barbadoes, where the apish grossness of African coast types has been perpetuated unchanged;--and the contrast may well astonish!...