David F. Dorr

The Author of this book, though a quadroon, is pleased to announce himself the “Colored man around the world.” Not because he may look at a colored man’s position as an honorable one at this age of the world, he is too smart for that, but because he has the satisfaction of looking with his own eyes and reason at the ruins of the ancestors of which he is the posterity. If the ruins of the Author’s ancestors were not a living language of their scientific majesty, this book could receive no such appellation with pride. Luxor, Carnack, the Memnonian and the Pyramids make us exclaim, “What monuments of pride can surpass these? what genius must have reflected on their foundations! what an ambition these people must have given to the rest of the world when found the glory of the world in their hieroglyphic stronghold of learning,” whose stronghold, to-day, is not to be battered down, because we cannot reach their hidden alphabet. Who is as one, we might suppose, “learned in all the learning of the Egyptians.” Have we as learned a man as Moses, and if yes, who can prove it? How did he come to do what no man can do now? You answer, God aided him; that is not the question! No, all you know about it is he was “learned in all the learning of the Egyptians,” that is the answer; and thereby knew how to facilitate a glorious cause at heart, because had he been less learned, who could conceive how he could have proved to us to be a man full of successful logic. Well, who were the Egyptians? Ask Homer if their lips were not thick, their hair curly, their feet flat and their skin black.

A Colored Man Round the World