450 VARIETIES OF MANKIND. 



is sufficiently known ; the hoofs of the pig may be undivided, 

 bisulcous, or trisulcous. 



These are regarded by naturalists as but accidental varieties, 

 yet they equal or surpass the varieties existing among mankind. 

 We are consequently led by analogy to conclude, that the dif- 

 ferences of nations are not original but acquired, and impose no 

 necessity for believing that more than one stock was at first 

 created. 



Direct facts harmonise with this conclusion. All races run 

 insensibly one into another, and therefore innumerable interme- 

 diate examples occur where the distinction between two varieties 

 is lost. Again, no peculiarity exists in any variety which does 

 not show itself occasionally in another. Many instances of these 

 facts have been already related (page 437, note *). The diffi- 

 culty of regarding the negro as of the same stock with ourselves 

 vanishes on viewing these circumstances and on reflecting that 

 he and ourselves are two extremes, one of which may have 

 sprung from the other by means of several intermediate devia- 

 tions, although experience may not justify us in supposing any 

 single deviation of sufficient magnitude.* Lastly, both the males 



* In regard to colour, however, the Albino proves how great a change may 

 take place in one generation. In the Memoirs of the London Medical Society, 

 (Vol. Hi.) is described a case, where not only patches of the hair of the 

 head of an European changed from black to perfect white, first on one side 

 and then on the other, and in the course of seven years every hair became white 

 excepting the eyebrows, but the skin also from being swarthy l>ccamc fair. 

 (I may add that the irides remained unchanged, and that another case is an- 

 nexed to it where half the hair was black and lank, and the other half light and 

 frizzled.) I recollect accounts of three persons who belonged to the dark races, 

 turning white, — one of a negress, in Maryland, forty years of age, who had 

 been turning white during the last fifteen years, and had become scarcely 

 inferior in any part of her surface to an European, and was still changing, 

 {Phil. Trans. Vol. li.)> — one of a man, born in Bengal, near sixty years of age, 

 who left India in his tenth year, and had for nine years been changing to white. 

 (Dr. Duncan, Jun. Reports in the Practice of the Clinical Ward of the Royal 



