172 DIVERSITY OF RACES. 



To him who looks out on the world with an inquiring eye, it 

 would seem that there could remain no longer a doubt in regard 

 to diversities in the human family, independent of climatic and 

 sectional influences. For over all the earth, wherever man is 

 found, he beholds the unvarying marks of species; but not a 

 trace of any uniform effects from either heat or cold, fertility or 

 barrenness. From the bleak and inhospitable regions of Terra 

 del Fnego, through the torrid Pampas and forests of the Ama- 

 zon, as far as to the icy abode of the Esquimaux, the American 

 Aborigines are physically the same.* The negroes of Van 

 Dieman's Landf and Caffraria^: are even darker in complexion 

 than the Abyssins, the GallasJ and numerous tribes of Ethiopia, 

 which roam beneath the scorching sun of the Line. The white 

 man possesses the same organization on the cheerless mountains 

 of Caucasus as in the loveliest valleys of the Rhine. And the black 

 man is the same, whether on the arid wastes of his native Nig- 

 ritia, or the exuberant fields of the American States. Local 

 influence may affect its subject for a season or a life ; but it has 

 never wrought an hereditary change. The same sun in his round 

 of ages could never have bleached the European and blackened 

 the African, or tinged the Asiatic with yellow and the Indian 

 with red. Uniformity without variableness is the offspring of 

 nature; and when we find this following not in the train of ex- 

 traneous causes, we must turn to race itself as the key to the 

 mystery. 



Behold then the world divided not less into continents than it 

 is by families of men. Australia, and South Africa whither the 

 roving Arab has not fought his way, present a species of the 

 most distinct character, stamped as it is with the impress of its 

 own degradation. The Aborigines of the New World bear every 

 mark of a peculiar people. As the beings of a day, in their 

 slender proportions and delicate hue, they exhibit the signs of 

 their own evanescence. Asia teems with its countless myriads, 



*Malte Brun's " Univ. Geog." Boston Ed. of 8 vols., vol. 5, p. 15. 

 fMalteBrun, vol. 1, p. 547. 



tPrichard's " Phys. Hist, of Mankind," 3d Ed., Lond., vol. 2, p. 289. 

 gPrickard, vol. 2, p. 136. || Priclmrd, vol. 2, p. 15G. 



