8 HYBRIDITY OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 



important, or if, after having by an analytical process, first 

 studied the various races separately, we now subject them to a 

 synthetic process, we soon recognise that there exists among 

 them numerous affinities, which enable us to dispose them in 

 a certain number of natural groups. 



The ensemble of the characters common to each group, con- 

 stitute the type of that group. Thus, all the races we have 

 just enumerated, and many others, have the skin white, regu- 

 lar features, soft hair, oval face, vertical jaws, and elliptical 

 cranium, etc. These points of resemblance give them in 

 some sort a family likeness, by which they are recognised at 

 once, and which has caused them to be designated by the 

 collective name of Caucasian races. The hyperborean races, 

 and those of Eastern Asia, constitute the family of Mongolian 

 races ; the group of Ethiopian races equally comprises a large 

 number of black races with woolly hair, and a prognathous 

 head. The American and the Malayo-Polynesian races form 

 the two last groups. 



It must not be believed that all human races can with equal 

 facility be ranged in either of these divisions ; nor must we 

 believe that the characteristic traits of one group are equally 

 marked in all the dependent races ; nor even that they are 

 found combined in any of these races ; nor, finally, that in the 

 centre of each group we find a typical race in which all the 

 characters have their maximum of development. This might 

 be the case if all known races had descended from five primi- 

 tive stocks, as admitted by several polygenists, or if, as many 

 monogenists think, humanity, one in the beginning, had soon 

 afterwards been divided into five principal trunks, from which 

 issued, as so many accessory branches, the numerous sub- 

 divisions which constitute the secondary races. But there is 

 no race which can pretend to personify within itself the type to 

 which it belongs. This type is fictitious ; the description is an 

 ideal one, like the forms of the Apollo de Belvedere. Human 

 types, like all other types, are merely abstractions, and in pro- 

 portion as we attach more importance to this or that character, 

 we obtain a more or less considerable number of types. Thus, 

 Blumenbach had five, Cuvier only three, and Berard describes 



