Of all foreign missionary fields, there is no one so calculated to stir the American heart as Africa. Africa is at the lowest degree in the scale of civilization, and America is fast rising to the highest a vast ocean rolls between them, they know but little of each other, have less present intercommunication than most other nations, yet how intimate, how wonderful the conjunction between these extremes of civilization! That negro-slavery is an anomaly in American civilization, can hardly be denied, but that it is an anomaly in the world's progress, no considerate mind will affirm. Potiphar bought Joseph of the Ishmaelites and made him his slave, but there was then instituted a relation, intimate and interesting, and pregnant with vast and beneficent results. American Christians are compelled to be cautious in speaking on this theme, and have directed their efforts more to some other portion of heathendom than to Africa; but beneath this external reserve there is a tender and lively interest in all that pertains to the negro and the negro's fatherland, which will gradually work itself out into the grandest manifestations.
It is not my intention to speak of the whole of the continent of Africa, but only of that portion which lies south of the Great Desert. The northern division of the continent, inhabited by Moors, and fronting on the Mediterranean Sea, has had a very different history, and will have a very different future, from the central and southern divisions. The central and western region is by far the most
