62 BECAPITULATION AND CONCLUSION. 



new climate, and subjected to a new mode of life, conserves 

 and transmits to posterity all the essential characters of his 

 race, and his descendants do not acquire the character of the 

 indigenous race or races. Ccelum, non corpus mutant qui trans 

 mare currunt. 



The monogenists have objected that the period of distant 

 colonies is too recent ; that the observations tending to esta- 

 blish the permanence of human types date scarcely from three 

 or four centuries, and that this lapse of time is insufficient to 

 produce a transformation of races, and that such a transforma- 

 tion has been produced gradually during the long series of 

 centuries elapsed, according to some from the creation of man, 

 and according to others since the Deluge. 



But the study of the Egyptian paintings has shown, that on 

 the one hand the principal types of the human genus existed 

 then, 2,500 years at least before Jesus Christ, as they exist at 

 this day. 



Again, the Jewish race, scattered for more than eighteen 

 centuries in the most different climates, is everywhere the 

 same now as it was in Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs. 



The period of positive observations dates thus, from more 

 than forty centuries and not from three or four. 1 



Having no longer any hope to prove by direct demonstra- 

 tions that the distinctive characters of human races are trans- 

 formations of one primitive type, the monogenists sought for 

 indirect proofs. They believed to have found them in this 

 fact, or rather assertion, that there is always a certain relation 

 between the characters of human races and the media in which 



1 There exist at present in northern Africa, down to the Sahara, a fair-haired 

 race of men, who have been held to be the descendants of the Vandals. It is 

 certain that no white race has been established in these parts since the time 

 of Genserich, that is to say, some fourteen centuries. If so, there would re- 

 sult from it that a sojourn of fourteen centuries upon the African soil was 

 not sufficient to darken the hair of the white race. But Dumoulin, taking 

 the text of Procopius for his guide, had already demonstrated that the light- 

 haired race of northern Africa had nothing in common with the Vandals ; 

 and I have recently found a passage in the Periple dc la Mcditerrant'-e de 

 Syclax, a work anterior to Alexander the Great, in which mention is made of 

 a tribe of light-haired Lybians, who occupied the littoral of the Minor Syrtis, 

 not far from Mount Auress, where to this day one of the principal tribes of 

 light-haired Kabyles resides. (See Bulletins de la Soc. d'Anthropologic, seance 

 du 10 Fevrier, 1800.) 



