2 HYBRIDITY IN THE HUMAN SPECIES. 



parent stocks is incapable of perpetuation. 1 It has even been 

 asserted that the United States of America, where the Anglo- 

 Saxon race is still predominant, but which is overrun by immi- 

 grants of various other races, is, by that very circumstance, 

 threatened with decay, inasmuch as this continuous immigra- 

 tion may have the effect of producing a hybrid race containing 

 the germ of future sterility. Do we not know that, on tho 

 faith of this prognostication, a certain party has proposed the 

 restriction of foreign immigration, and even in England there 

 have been serious men who have predicted, from ethnological 

 causes, the overthrow of the United States, just as Ezekiel pre- 

 dicted the ruin of Alexandria. 



When we see the prosperity and the power of the new con- 

 tinent grow with such unexampled rapidity, we can certainly 

 put no faith in such a prediction. Still there must have been 

 a certain number of fundamental facts, which led even mono- 

 genists to deny the viability of all crossed races. They must 

 have sought in vain among the nations of the earth for a race 

 manifestly hybrid, with well-defined characters, intermediate 

 between two known races, perpetuating itself without the con- 

 currence of the parent races. 



" When the facts quoted above," says M. Georges Pouchet, 

 " are not sufficient to prove that a mongrel breed cannot be en- 

 gendered, can we anywhere find one ? Do we find a people 

 conserving a medium type between two other types ? We see 

 them nowhere just as little as we see a race of mules. The fact 

 is, that such a race, such a type can only have an ephemeral 

 subjective existence. 2 



The question, where do we find hybrid races subsisting by 

 themselves, has been asked before M. Pouchet. Dr. Prichard, 



1 " The sole action of the laws of Hybridity," says Nott, " might extermi- 

 nate the whole human species if all the various types of human beings ac- 

 tually existing on the earth were completely to amalgamate." Types of 

 Mankind, p. 407, eighth edit., Philadelphia, 1857. Dr. Robert Knox is not 

 less explicit. " I do not believe that any Mulatto race can be maintained be- 

 yond the third or fourth generation by Mulattos merely ; they must inter- 

 maiTy with the pure races or perish." Robert Knox, The Races of Men, 

 London, 1850. 



2 Georges Pouchet, De la Plurality des Races Humaines, p. 14-0, Paris, 1858. 

 [A translation of this work will shortly be published by the Anthropological 

 Society of London, edited by T. Bendyshe, Esq., M.A., F.A.S.L. Editor.] 



