218 THE DESCENT OF MAN. [Part I. 



bo it is with every other character. Now all naturalists 

 have learned, by dearly-bought experience, how rash it 

 is to attempt to define species by the aid of inconstant 

 characters. 



But the most weighty of all the arguments against 

 treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they 

 graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as 

 far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed. Man 

 has been studied more carefully than any other organic 

 being, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity 

 among capable judges whether he should be classed as a 

 single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacqui- 

 not), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven 

 (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory 

 St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), 

 sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. 17 

 This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races 

 ought not to be ranked as species, but it shows that they 

 graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to 

 discover clear distinctive characters between them. 



Every naturalist who has had the misfortune to under- 

 take the description of a group of highly-varying organ- 

 isms, has encountered cases (I speak after experience) 

 precisely like that of man ; and if of a cautious disposi- 

 tion, he will end by uniting all the forms which graduate 

 into each other as a single species ; for he will say to him- 

 self that he has no right to give names to objects which 

 he cannot define. Cases of this kind occur in the Order 

 which includes man, namely, in certain genera of monkeys ; 



105) that the skulls of many South Germans and Swiss are " as short and 

 as broad as those of the Tartars," etc. 



17 See a good discussion on this subject in Waitz, ' Introduct. to An- 

 thropology,' Eng. translat. 1863, pp. 198-208, 227. I have taken some 

 of the above statements from H. Tuttle's ' Origin and Antiquity of Physical 

 Man,' Boston, 1866, p. 35. 



