140 REPORT — 1851. 



knowledge hitherto acquired tends to confirm our instinctive belief and almost 

 universal tradition respecting the unity of the human race, it seems reason- 

 able to start with the assumption that men cannot be divided into zoological 

 genera ; and as every presumption is in favour of this axiom, we must leave 

 the omis probandi, with regard to any other hypothesis, upon those who feel 

 disposed to contradict us. For my own part, I confess I feel somewhat in- 

 dignant when I fall in with an attempt to classify men according to the ex- 

 ternal peculiarities of feature and colour. I consider it a degrading theory 

 to maintain that man belongs to the merely animal kingdom at all ; and if in 

 other departments of their own science naturalists would refuse to place in 

 the same group, whether zoological or phytological, species which were not 

 connected together by at least three marks of essential affinity, affecting their 

 absolute definition, I cannot understand why man, the only reasoning and 

 thinking being, should be placed by the side of those creatures, which cannot 

 reason or speak, merely on the strength of an outward analogy, which does 

 not in tlie slightest degree affect our distinctive attributes. Scientific eth- 

 nology seems to me to start from the postulate that our race is essentially 

 one, and accidentally different. In many cases, we can clearly trace the 

 causation of these differences to the influence of climate, aliment, and civi- 

 lization, and as they do not, in the widest and most pronounced form of dis- 

 crepancy, interfere with the definition of man, as such, it is surely unscientific 

 to make ethnography dependent in any way on the casualties of physical 

 conformation. Speaking with reference to the whole period of time which 

 must have elapsed since the establishment of our species on the surface of 

 this planet, we may say that the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in North 

 America is an event of yesterday, and yet they already begin to exhibit 

 physical characteristics more akin to those of their neighbours than to those 

 of their ancestors. Peculiarities affecting the cellular substance and max- 

 illary process may place an almost Turanian stamp on a highly cultivated 

 United States man, who can discourse eloquently in the language of Shaks- 

 peare, who bears an English name, and exhibits in all his actions the energy 

 of that race which has spread its colonies over the whole world. Differences 

 of craniological structure and intellectual development must also be re- 

 garded as accidents perfectly consistent, not only with the aboriginal unity, 

 but also 'vith the present identity of men. May not the same family contain 

 an idiot and a philosopher ? Does not every family exhibit the gradation 

 of helpless infant, thoughtless boy, and mature man ? It is surely idle to 

 endeavour to classify the human race by distinctions which may be found in 

 the same household. The latest book* which has treated " the varieties 

 of man" as a branch of "natural history," arranges the population of the 

 world under three great subdivisions : the MongolidcB, corresponding mainly 

 to the Turanians; the AtlantidcB, including the Semitic race; and the 

 JapetidcB, who are identical with the Indo-Europeans. Now almost any 

 man's experience may convince him that hereditary civilization and similar 

 opportunities will place Jews and Gentiles, Mongolians and Indo-Germans, 

 on a footing of the most perfect equality. The Atlantid Toussaint was a 

 match for his Japhetic antagonists ; the Mongolian Kossuth has held his own 

 in European statesmanship ; and on the battle-field of Austerlitz the same 

 military talents were displayed by Miloradowitch, who was a Servian and 

 therefore of the purest Indo-German stock, by Bagration, who was a Geor- 

 gian prince, and thei-efore of Mongol extraction, and by Soult, who, according 

 to DTsraeli, derived his origin from the Semitic Jews. 

 As then a difference of climate and aliment is calculated to produce, in 

 * Dr. Latham's. 



