FROM OUR NEW YORK CORRESPONDENT.

NEW YORK, Sept. 27, 1856.

MR. EDITOR:—To-day, after all, is not so re
gal as he looks; there is tinsel and pretension
in his make-up. How we boast, for example of
the diffusion and cheapness of knowledge!—Christendom
contains at least seventy millions
of adults; how many of them can read and
write? How many of them know the hygienic
value of fresh air? Even our scientific archi
tects erect in the Fifth Avenue palaces and
churches, which imitate the beauty of Grecian
temples, and, in the teeth of modern science,
exclude from them, as the Greeks did, all
sources for the supply of fresh, and the expul
sion of four air! Hence, it is evident that in
three thousand years, this great Caucasian race
have remained stagnant and stupid in excluding
one of the simplest and most necessary means
of promoting health, in the construction of their
domicils.

"But knowledge is so cheap now-a-days!
The Pulpit, the PRESS, and the Forum, radiate
light and learning to the millions!" Let us
see. Do you wish to learn French or German?
It is one dollar a lesson. Do you wish thorough
instruction on the Piano? Gottschalk is at
hand; only four dollars an hour. Or, perhaps
seized with the laudable desire to extend the
boundaries of human knowledge, to burnish one
more of the golden links, you would master some
specific branch of thought, so as to carry it on
beyond where the last writer or thinker left off?
What shall it be? The nebulae of Orion? Or
the not unlike microscopic cells of a disintegrated cancer? Or Egyptology, to measure
quills with Nott and Gliddon? Or metamorphic rocks? Or the laws which link light, heat
and electricity? Any one of these studies, to be thoroughly pursued, will require an outlay of money, perfectly astounding, quite sufficient to disabuse the student of the idea that "" Nay, I think it will cost any given man nearly as much to read Plato and Aristotle in print to-day, as it would have cost an Attic youth within a hundred years after the Stagyrite "took wine with Alcibiades."

Such thoughts crowded in my brain as the Professor and I walked into Bailliere's, he bent
on Sines and Co-Sines and Transcendental Roots, I to steal another glimpse into that last

, "The Solar System of the Ancients Dis
covered," by Wilson (not Ethiop.) This book
fascinates me because it carries out a train of
thought I fell upon in this wise. You remem
ber Bancroft's lecture on Human Progress;
well, having to get up a short lecture, soon af
ter he delivered that one, I questioned some of
his positions in a brief enquiry into the nature
and limits of Human Progress. I went so far
as to assert that we had evidence, on the one
hand, on the yet existing, unsubmerged crust of
the earth, of our race having attained power, and
therefore knowledge, as great as that of to-day:
and on the other assumed that there are, in his
relation to his planet, plain limits beyond which
human intelligence had not and could reach;
and adduced architecture, a case in point, to
show that we had made no more advances in
architecture since the Flood, than the bee has
in the construction of his cell—the difference
being, that we oscillate from perfect to imper
fect, while the bee is always perfect; then ad
duced the very beautiful reasons by which
Swan (on the Brain and Mind) shews the rela
tion between the hexagonal eye lenses of the
bee and his hexagonal cell: and reasons that,
in like manner, only in higher degree, "proud
man" constructs his houses of brick and stone,
and though, subject to the limited surroundings
of his planetary influences.

Now this man, Wilson, goes on to prove, by
exact mathematical formulae, that the Pyramids
are built on law co-incident with the well known
law of gravity, starting from the top and in
creasing with the squares of the distances. He
further shews that the Temple of Luxor be
trays in its construction, when read with alge
braic formulae, the distances, places, and the
laws of the motion of the starts which go to
make up the solar system. This much I get
from peeps between the uncut leaves of the
book. What a field of thought! Are we
to understand that the Negroid, or as Gobineau
calls them, the "" Egyptian, understood
the laws for the discovery of which we fall down
before Kepler and Newton; or, are we to un
derstand that those "PRIMEVAL PEOPLES," like
the cell-building bee, were flooded with the
harmonies which make our portion of celestial
space, and builded in accordance with the grand
laws that move and govern and influence our
planet?

"See here, Professor," I exclaimed, "Gumpach on the 'Revolution of the Moon on her
Axis;' do you remember our two week's dispute on that point; the cart wheels we lectured

before, the discs we drew, the circles we pro
jected some ten years ago?"

.—"Yes; and you stupidly maintained
that the moon revolve on her axis[;?]
this Gumpach is a sensible [illegible]
[illegible] fellow, and agrees
with science that the moon revolve on her
axis."

flattish, I began looking (between
the uncut leaves) at the diagrams recognized at
once which way they pointed and finally glanc
ing at the preface, I suddenly gripped his hand
and read: "It is not without diffidence that I
lay before the public, a demonstration that,
contrary to the received opinion of the scienti
fic world, the moon does not revolve on its ax
is * * * so far from such a revolution be
ing demonstrated according to the theory of
gravity, it can only be maintained by denying
that theory." May be I did not crow.

Here, then, Mr. Editor, are books I long to
read. Why not buy them? Well, I'll tell you,
if it be a bit of a family secret. You see it is
some ten years since. Mrs. Communipaw told
me that we wanted new chairs for our sitting
room: and during all these ten years, the dear, pa
tient woman has exclaimed at least twice, per
haps four times a year, "good by chairs," as I
would march into the house, in a perfect extacy of
delight with some costly book under my arm!—Well
sir, I her last month for the first time
say this out loud, and—I have bought the chairs
this month.

It was a plain case of chairs, and smiles
Egyptology and the Moon's Revolution—and
chairs had it: doubtless the moon will remain
undisturbed, while whole orreries of not less celes
tial hoops will circle round the beautiful rose
wood, (imitation,) and rush seated chairs. I am
not quite reconciled with the chairs: they hold
their backs so high, and look down so contemp
tuously at the half worn carpet, and the old
grate. However I have an abstract respect for
chairs, well made ample-bottomed spine-adapted
chairs; I think they have had a wonderful in
fluence on thought and civilization; and one of
these days will follow out their relations to soci
ety.

"Come, Professor, let's go." There he stands,
pencil and memorandum both in one hand, and,
"De Nurgan on the Calculus" in the other:
buried in & and —how sweet and fas
cinating is this spring of knowledge! and so
we leave Bailliere's.

Very little news hereabouts: and it irks me to
think that five weeks must elapse before the
din of shall fade from the atmos
phere: it pains me to see meetings of black
men assembled to support a man who is inflexi
bly opposed to meddling with slavery in the
slave States. This is a great deal worse than
celebrating the fourth of July.

I can easily understand how a man like you,
a born American and Politician, could swing

into the Political Cauldron where the "hardest
blows are given and received;" and I rather
think you are being gratified in this last partic
ular, judging from the October number of the
"." And if you feel like
giving as good as he sent, just lay hold of
Brother Goodell fairly and squarely and knock
the logic out of his article. If you will do this
I will weave a garland of oak leaves and bring
it with me to Rochester, for your brow.

COMMUNIPAWSmith, James McCune

James McCune Smith (1813–65), a prominent black physician, abolitionist, and writer, was born in New York City to an enslaved father and a self-emancipated mother. He attended the New York African Free School, but was denied admission to Columbia University, Geneva Medical College, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He turned to the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where he received a B.A. (1835), M.A. (1836), and M.D. (1837). Upon returning to New York, he opened a pharmacy and medical practice that catered to both blacks and whites. He became involved in the abolitionist movement, serving as an associate editor of the Colored American in 1839, contributed regularly to the Anglo-African Magazine, and wrote correspondence for the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper under the pseudonym “Communipaw.” Smith also wrote the introduction to Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In 1861, Smith helped finance the revival of the Weekly Anglo-African to oppose black colonization and emigration, and he was a prominent member of the New York City Young Men’s Association, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and the New York African Society for Mutual Relief. He was the sole attending physician of the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children, a member and vestryman of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, and a trustee of the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children. In 1863 Wilberforce College appointed Smith professor of anthropology, but illness kept him from assuming his post. Lib., 1 June 1838; FDP, 18 May 1855; Douglass Papers, ser. 2:7–19; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 243; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 90–92, 103, 110; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 115, 134; Rhoda G. Freeman, “The Free Negro in New York City in the Era before the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1966), 40–42, 177, 186, 195, 200, 247, 276, 286, 325, 353, 393; DAB, 27:288–89. .

NEW YORK, Sept. 27, 1856.

P. S. Mrs. C. got hold of this MSS., and
desires me to add that she has ordered a three
legged stool. I have escaped for the present
under plea of violent tooth-ache; the dear soul
accompanied me to the Dentist's and witnessed
its extraction: it was a surd of the third power: the forceps slipped four times.