HEREDIPY IN COLOR.

If a white man parries a negro, their children, boya and girls alike, aro all mulattos. Lot v's mate lo ourselves no allusions or mistakes upon tfois soo.re —

each one is simply and solely a pure mulatto, exactly half-way in color, feature, hair, and statue, between his father's faco and his mother's. People who have notlived in a mixed community of blacks and whites often ignore or misunderstand this fundamental fact of hereditary philosophy ; they imagine that ono of the children of such a marriage may be light hrown, and another dark brown ; one almost white, and one almost black ; that the re-ulting strains may to a great extent be mingled indefinitely and in varying proportions. Not a bit of it. A mulatto is a mulatto, and a quadroon is a quadroon, with just one-balf and one-fourth of negro blood respectively ; and aoyonp who has once lived in an ox-slave-onning country can pick out the proportion of blnck or white elements in any particular brown person he meets witli as muoh accuracy as the stud-book shows in recording the pedigree of famous racehorses. Black and whiteproduca mulattos — all mulattos alike to n shado of identity ; mulatto and white produco quadroon, and no mistake about it ; mulatto and black produco aambo ; quadroon and white oclorocn — and so forth ad infinitum. After the third cross persistently in either direction, tlie stiain of which less than one-eighth persists becomes at last practically indistinguishable, and the child is " white by law " or " black by law," ns the o;ise may be, without tho faintest mark of its slight opposite intermixture. T speak hero of facts which I hava carefully examined at firsthand ; all the nonsensical talk about finger-nails and knuckles, and persistence of the negro typo for ovor, is pure unmitigated slave-owning prejudice The child of ao octoroon by a white man is simply whito ; and no ncutenosa on earth, no scrutiny conceivable would ever discover tho one-sixteenth share of black blood by any possible test savo documentary evidence. Here, tlion, we havo a clear, physical, and almost mathematically demonstrable caso, showing tbat, so far as regards bodily peculiarities at least, the child is on the average just equally compounded of traits derived from both its paronts. Amonghundrods nnd hundredsof mulatto and quadroon children whom I bave observed, I have never known a single genuine instance to tha contrary. Heredity comes out exactly true ; you get just as much of each color in every case as you would naturally oxpect to do from a mixture of given proportions. In other words, all mulattos aro rccognisably different from all quadroons, and all quadroons from nil octoroons or all sambos.— From " The Cause of Character, 1 ' in the Cornhill Magazine.