290 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [vj, xl 



that can be said for tliem is, that they are somewhat more 

 imitative and somewhat more teachable than any brute 

 animals. In the presence of the Aryan, even under the 

 most favourable circumstances, they tend to become extin- 

 guished, rather tlian to appropriate the results of a civiliza- 

 tion which there is no reason to suppose they could ever 

 have originated. The two great races of Middle Africa, the 

 Negroes and the Kaffirs,^ have shown, by their ability to 

 endure slave labour, their superiority to those above men- 

 tioned ; but their career, where it has not been interfered 

 with by white men, has been but little less monotonous than 

 the career of a brute species. Of all these barbarian races, 

 we commonly say that they have no history ; and by this 

 we mean that throughout long ages they have made no 

 appreciable progress. In a similar sense we should say of 

 a race of monkeys or elephants, that it has no history. 



Of like import is the fact, that as we go backward in time 

 we find the jDrogressiveness of the civilized races continually 

 diminishing. No previous century ever saw anything ap- 

 proaching to the increase in social complexity which has 

 been wrought in America and Europe since 1789. In science 

 and in the industrial arts the change has been greater than 

 in the ten preceding centuries taken together. Contrast the 

 seventeen centuries which it took to remodel the astronomy 

 of Hipparchos with the forty years which it has taken to 

 remodel the chemistry of Berzelius and the biology of Cuvier. 

 Note how the law of gravitation was nearly a century in 

 getting generally accepted by foreign astroiiomers,^ while 



* It is Haeckel who asserts a distinction of race between the Negroes and 

 Kaffirs. It is not necessary, however, to insist upon the distinction. 



* It was still on trial in France in 1749, when Clairaut and Lalande mag- 

 nificently Terified it by calculating the retardation of H alley's comet. It 

 may be said that the French are notoriously slow in adopting ideas which 

 have originated in other countries, and that they now ignore natural selection 

 Diuch as they formerly ignored gravitation. Nevertheless, in spite of the 

 Academy and M. Flourens, there are plain indications that the doctrine of 

 •pecial creations is doomed speedily to suffer the fate in France which it has 

 •iready suffered in Germany," England, and America. 



