GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. 9 



fifteen types. This is also proved by the fact, that whilst many 

 races attach themselves directly and evidently to a fixed type, 

 there are others belonging to two very dissimilar types. Thus 

 the Abyssinians are Caucasian in form and Ethiopian by colour. 

 The description of the principal types is thus merely a methodi- 

 cal process, fit to facilitate, by the formation of a certain number 

 of groups, the comparison of human races, and to simplify the 

 partial description of each. This division has, moreover, the 

 advantage of establishing for the greater part of the races, 

 their degree of relative affinity or divergence. It even accords 

 to a certain point with their primitive repartition upon the 

 surface of the globe, which has permitted, without doing any 

 violence to the facts, to distinguish the types by denominations 

 borrowed from geography. 1 



There is in the human mind a tendency to personify abstrac- 

 tions. These ideal types have usurped a place in the domain 

 of facts, so that a real existence has been given to them. The 

 monogenists hid, strictly speaking, a right to do so without 

 any violence to their principles; but the polygenists, who 

 have followed their example, have sinned against logic. The 

 former attribute all varieties of the human species to the nu- 

 merous modifications of five 'principal races, issued themselves 

 from one common stock, and the same influences which, accord- 

 ing to them, have in the origin produced fundamental races, have 

 afterwards by an analogous process produced the secondary races. 

 All this is sufficiently clear ; and such stood the question when 



1 These geographical denominations are certainly not irreproachable ; they 

 have even the inconvenience of giving rise to the false idea, that all races of 

 the same type originated in the same region ; that all the Whites came from 

 the Caucasus, all the Mongolians from Mongolia, the Blacks from Nigritia, 

 even the Van-Diemen islanders. I have, however, thought proper to retain 

 these denominations, as they are generally in use, and have no zoological 

 signification. Such is not the case with the denominations adopted by certain 

 authors derived from the colour of the skin. Thus the Caucasians were 

 termed the white, the Mongolians the yellow, the Ethiopian the black, the 

 Malayo-Polynesian the brown, and finally, the American the red race. It 

 has been shown that the American type alone includes red, brown, black, 

 white and yellow races. There are brown races in the American, and even in 

 the Caucasian type. All the black races do not belong to the Ethiopian type ; 

 and finally, the Malayo-Polynesian type comprises races of colours as various 

 as those belonging to the American type. A classification founded on dif- 

 ferences of colour would lead to numerous and serious errors. 



