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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Europe and America. With a clear insight into the causes of social phenomena, he possesses great independence of mind and judgment. Though temporarily withdrawn from official connection with the association, he continues his membership, and is in thorough sympathy with its work and aims.

Mr. Herbert Spencer has manifested his sustained interest in the objects and work of the association by frequent correspondence and generous commendation of its efforts and accomplishments. After declining membership in the French Academy and the leading scientific bodies of Europe, he paid the Brooklyn Ethical Association the high compliment of accepting its corresponding membership. The cordial feeling on his part is heartily reciprocated by every member of the association, and it has fallen to the lot of some of its representatives to be honored by the privilege of defending Mr. Spencer against the unjust assaults of his critics on this side of the Atlantic. Happily, he has lived to see his great work almost accomplished, and its purport much better understood than it was two decades ago. Nowhere has it found firmer or more appreciative friends than in America. That the Ethical Association has been able in a modest way to take up and carry on the work of popularizing evolution views so ably begun by the founder of The Popular Science Monthly is not the least among the sources of congratulation in the judgment of its members.

To continue this work, and by means thereof to aid in the scientific solution of those vast and impending problems of our social and political life in the discussion of which, under the prevailing a priori and empirical methods, wisdom has often been obscured by a multitude of unscientific and conflicting counsels, is their continued ambition, and to this end they solicit the sympathy and co-operation of all consenting minds.

Several travelers in Africa remark upon the better condition of the negroes in proportion as they are remote from the white men. Mr. Alfred Coode Hone, in his book, Tanganyika, which records his eleven years' experiences in central Africa, says that along almost any section of the continent, from coast to center, "the farther the traveler advances into the interior, the better is the condition of the natives found to be; less drunkenness, less immorality, more industry and independence." Mr. Wilmot Brooke, says the London Spectator, writing of the west coast, tells us the same story, with a more severe reference to the exterior influences inimical to the African peoples. Describing the degradation of the coast tribes and its causes, he adds, "Last of all, they are dragged lower still by their contact with the white man." As he ascended the Niger, the squalid villages were seen no more; they were replaced by fine, clean, open towns, with thousands of inhabitants, and he entered a new world, physical, political, social, and religious.

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