Saying the unsayable
Sir: M. M. Carlin (Letters, 12 September) sug- gests that Wordsworth and Archimedes had low IQS and would have been unable to escape the slave traders if born in Africa. He cannot have it both ways, but if he intends to suggest that people of high IQ might have been caught through lack of physical prowess or inattention.
I am bound to put two other considerations to him:
(1) Both Wordsworth and Archimedes were the sons of prosperous or influential men. Pro, sperous men tend to have high is and are, in any society, in a better position to protect themselves and their families from the at- tentions of such persons as marauding slave traders or press-gangs.
(2) Even if caught, they both might have been let off on grounds of physical ineptitude if, as seems likely, slaves were selected for their muscular rather than for their mental at- tributes.
My main point is that the negro population of America may not be a typical cross-section of the negro race as a whole and that any con- clusion based on such an assumption is liable to be invalidated by subsequent evidence.
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