ministers are pastors of Jamaica churches; two are missionaries in Africa; two (recently three) in Hayti; one in Cuba; three in Turks Island, the Caicos, and San Domingo; and five in the United States of America. These are all natives of Jamaica, most of them black And at the annual meetings of the Jamaica Baptist Union they may be seen sitting side by side on terms of perfect equality with their European brethren, distinctions of colour having no recognition in our Jamaica church assemblies.

men.

It will thus be seen that the College includes three departments : the theological for the training and education of missionaries; the normal school for the training of teachers; and a model day school, as a practising ground for the latter. The work is done by three tutors, with an assistant in the normal school classes, and a master in the day school, numbering 200 children. These are the present writer as president; the Rev. Jas. Balfour, M.A., classical tutor; normal school tutor, with an assistant; and Mr. T. B. Stephenson, schoolmaster. The appointment of the tutors is with the English Baptist Missionary Society, which provides for their support, and for the erection and structural repairs of the College buildings; the board and residence of the students, and the salaries of the assistant normal school tutor and day school teacher, are in part provided for by the Jamaica churches, by an annual grant from the Dendy Trust Fund, and friends of education; and in the normal school department in part by grants in aid from Government, and an annual grant from the trustees of the Taylor Trust Fund in England.

OTHER WEST INDIA MISSIONS.

BESIDES Jamaica, the West India Missions of the Baptist Missionary Society include the Bahama Group, including Turks Island, the Caicos Islands, and across the sea to the south side of San Domingo, and the north side of Hayti, British Honduras, and Trinidad.

Each of these has its peculiarities, with much that is common to all. San Domingo and Hayti differ widely from the others. The former, once a possession of Spain, has a Spanish-speaking population; the latter, formerly a possession of France, has a French-speaking population. Both are now independent republics, subject to frequent revolutions, having passed through almost every variety of political and

constitutional change. All the others are British possessions, speaking the English language. In race, the vast majority of the inhabitants in each are of African descent, and until recent years were under the yoke of slavery. In San Domingo and Hayti the blacks revolted from their masters, fought out their freedom, and constituted independent governments, which, notwithstanding a succession of bloody conflicts in civil war, they still maintain. Both republics exist in the same island, their frontiers interlacing with little disturbance to each other. The people of both are Romanists in religion, though, in both, Protestant missionaries are freely tolerated.

The story of slavery, with its cruelties and abominations in Jamaica, having been sketched, need not be repeated, for it is the same wherever the accursed system prevails. That of its abolition in the two Black Republics, and how the battle of freedom was fought and won, must be sought in a wider page. It remains in the few pages allotted to us in this Centenary volume briefly to sketch, chiefly under their religious aspects, the rise and progress of West India Missions other than that of Jamaica, which the Baptist Missionary Society has originated.

THE BAHAMAS MISSION

was begun in 1833. The success of missionary operations has been secured under conditions of peculiar difficulty. The islands forming the group are very numerous, accessible only through dangerous channels, subject to violent storms, and at times absolutely unnavigable. Some of them are very remote from each other. The Turks Islands are 450 miles from New Providence, the largest of the group. In former times, prior to the erection of lighthouses, and other indicators of marine dangers, wrecks were of constant occurrence in the perilous seas in which the islands stand; and the inhabitants were largely employed either in the rescue of the stranded ships or in bringing the cargoes to the shore of those that had been irretrievably wrecked. This labour was recompensed by the salvage to which the people so engaged had a legal claim. To them, therefore, a wreck was a "godsend," and often enriched them so that they could for a while sit down in idleness without the stimulus of necessity to labour. It thus became more their interest to leave vessels to become wrecks than to save them. The writer remembers being half amused, when on his visit to Turks Island, at the hesitancy with which two men from one of the Caicos Islands answered his question, somewhat mischievously put, "Do you ever pray for a wreck?" Anyhow the inhabitants had

the reputation of being wreckers rather than rescuers.

On the whole the occupation was demoralising, tempting the community to rejoice in shipping misfortune as a means of subsistence. Happily this state of things now hardly exists, and the people are learning to live by honest industry, although in the Caicos Islands indolence and the lack of thrift still characterise the inhabitants. In the larger islands, however, great social progress has been made, and in the principal ones of the Bahama group tropical fruits are being cultivated for the American market, and, recently the cultivation of sisal hemp promises to make them among the richest of our West India possessions.

Another important industry in one of the largest of the Bahama group-Inagua-which is fifty-four miles long and fifteen broad, consists in the production of salt. This industry forms the principal occupation and support of the inhabitants of Grand Turk and several of the islands adjacent to it. In these islands nearly all the people, with the exception of a few fishermen, are salt-rakers, or dependent on the sale and shipment of salt. Salt-water for evaporation is mostly obtained from the sea through channels, guarded by sluices for letting in or shutting off the water. The only evaporating agent is the sun. In some of these salt-islands the evaporating pans, or ponds of saltwater, spread over the greater portion of the levels, with roads between them, just as there might be in a level country between large tracts of meadow-land. When the water has been evaporated, and the sun has hardened the residuum of salt, it is raked and piled into hillocks, which, with the white glistening appearance sparkling in the sunlight amongst the ponds in which the evaporating process is still going on, present a very remarkable, and not unpicturesque, appearance.

The religious profession of the inhabitants of New Providence, of which Nassau is the capital, had considerable influence with the Baptist Missionary Society in its choice as a mission-field, but, at the same time, was the occasion of many difficulties in its commencement. Among a population of between nine and ten thousand there was a considerable number of persons calling themselves Baptists, who traced their religious belief to the exertions of black men brought from the United States at the close of the war of 1813. Communications had been received in Jamaica from them, and a desire expressed to receive further instructions in the Gospel. The Rev. J. Burton, of Kingston, a missionary of long standing, offered to visit them as an agent of the Baptist Missionary Society. The people were in bondage, and