160 CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. [vn. 



I do not; and I am not acquainted with any man of 

 science, or duly instructed person, who does. 



A second school of monogenists, not worthy of much 

 attention, attempts to hold a place midway between the 

 Adamites and a third division, who take up a purely 

 scientific position, and require to be dealt with accord- 

 ingly. This third division, in fact, numbers in its ranks 

 Linnaeus, Buffon, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Prichard, and 

 many distinguished living ethnologists. 



These "Kational Monogenists/' or, at any rate, the 

 more modern among them, hold, firstly, that the present 

 condition of the earth has existed for untold ages ; 

 secondly, that, at a remote period, beyond the ken of 

 Archbishop Usher, man was created, somewhere between 

 the Caucasus and the Hindoo Koosh ; thirdly, that he 

 might have migrated thence to all parts of the inhabited 

 world, seeing that none of them are unattainable from 

 some other inhabited part, by men provided with only 

 such means of transport as savages are known to possess 

 and must have invented ; fourthly, that the operation of 

 the existing diversities of climate and other conditions 



o 



upon people so migrating, is sufficient to account for all 

 the diversities of mankind. 



Of the truth of the first of these propositions no com- 

 petent judge now entertains any doubt. The second is 

 more open to discussion, for in these latter days many 

 question the special creation of man : and even if his 

 special creation be granted, there is not a shadow of a 

 reason why he should have been created in Asia rather 

 than anywhere else. Of all the odd myths that have 

 arisen in the scientific world, the " Caucasian mystery," 

 invented quite innocently by Blumenbach, is the oddest. 

 A Georgian woman's skull was the handsomest in his 

 collection. Hence it became his model exemplar of 

 human skulls, from which all others might be regarded as 



