CHAP. XX. THEORY OF THEIR UNITY OF ORIGIN CONSIDERED. 387 



fruits of the earth, before even a stone implement or the 

 simplest form of canoe had been invented. They may, it is 

 said, have beo-un their career in some fertile island in the 

 tropics, where the warmth of the air was such that no 

 clothing was needed, and where there were no wild beasts to 

 endanger their safety. But as soon as their numbers in- 

 creased, they would be forced to migrate into regions less 

 secure and blessed with a less genial climate. Contests would 

 soon arise for the possession of the most fertile lands, where 

 game or pasture abounded, and their energies and inventive 

 powers would be called forth, so that, at length, they would 

 make progress in the arts. 



But as ethnologists have failed, as yet, to tr^ice back the 

 history of any one race to the area where it originated, some 

 zoologists of eminence have declared their belief that the 

 different races, whether they be three, five, twenty, or a much 

 greater number (for on this point there is an endless diver- 

 sity of opinion*), have all been primordial creations, having 

 from the first been stamjDcd with the characteristic features, 

 mental and bodil}'^, by which they are now distinguished, 

 except where intermarriage has given rise to mixed or hy- 

 brid races. Were we to admit, say thej^, a unity of origin of 

 such sti'ongly marked varieties as the Negro and European, 

 differing as they do in color and bodily constitution, each 

 fitted for distinct climates, and exhibiting some marked 

 peculiarities in their osteological, and even in some details 

 of cranial and cerebral, conformation, as well as in their 

 average intellectual endowments (see above, p. 91), — if, in 

 spite of the fact that all these attributes have been faithfully 

 handed down unaltered for hundreds of generations, we 

 are to believe that, in the course of time, they have all 

 diverged from one common stock, how shall we resist the 



* See Transactions of Ethnological Societj', vol. i. 1861. 



