IV METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY 247 



zoologists, is a whit better than that upon which 

 we maintain the specific distinctness of men. 



If presenting unanswerable objections to your 

 adversary were the same thing as proving your 

 own case, the Poly gen ists would be in a fair way 

 towards victory; but, unfortunately, as I have 

 already observed, they have as yet completely 

 failed to adduce satisfactory positive proof of the 

 specific diversity of mankind. Like the Mono- 

 genists, the Polygenists are of several sects ; some 

 imagine that their assumed species of mankind 

 were created where we find them the African in 

 Africa, and the Australian in Australia, along 

 with the other animals of their distributional 

 province ; others conceive that each species of 

 man has resulted from the modification of some 

 antecedent species of ape the American from 

 the broad-nosed Simians of the New World, the 

 African from the Troglodytic stock, the Mongolian 

 from the Orangs. 



The first hypothesis is hardly likely to win 

 much favour. The whole tendency of modern 

 science is to thrust the origination of things 

 further and further into the background ; and 

 the chief philosophical objection to Adam being, 

 not his oneness, but the hypothesis of his special 

 creation ; the multiplication of that objection 

 tenfold is, whatever it may look, an increase, 

 instead of a diminution, of the difficulties of the 

 case. And, as to the second alternative, it may 



