RECAPITULATION AND CONCLUSION. 63 



they exist. On close examination this assertion is found to be 

 without any foundation. On studying one by one the prin- 

 cipal ethnological characters and their distribution on the sur- 

 face of the globe, it has been shown that there is no relation 

 between these different characters and the climatic and hygi- 

 enic conditions. 



The monogenists then resorted to an argumentation still 

 more indirect. They advanced that in the whole genus homo 

 there existed a fund of common ideas, creeds, knowledge, and 

 language, attesting the common origin of all human beings. 

 It might be objected that this argument is without any value 

 whatever ; considering that indirect communications between 

 peoples of different origin might have passed to each other 

 words, usages, and ideas. But a profound study of the ques- 

 tion has shown that there are certain peoples who have abso- 

 lutely no notion of Grod or soul, whose languages have no rela- 

 tion whatever to any, who are altogether anti-social, and who 

 differ from the Caucasians more by the intellectual and moral 

 capacities than by their physical characters. 



There was even no necessity to insist upon the difficulty, or 

 rather geographical impossibility of the dispersion of so many 

 races proceeding from a common origin, nor to remark that 

 before the remote and the almost recent migrations of Euro- 

 peans, each natural group of human races occupied upon our 

 planet a region characterised by a special fauna ; that no 

 American animal was found either in Australia nor in the an- 

 cient continent, and where men of a new type were discovered, 

 there were only found animals belonging to species, even to 

 genera, and sometimes to zoological orders, without analogues 

 in other regions of the globe. 



And whilst it was thus simple to suppose that there were 

 several fad of the creation of man, as well as of other beings ; 

 and whilst this doctrine, so conformable to all the data fur- 

 nished by natural science, removed all geographical objections, 

 explaining thus all the analogies and differences of human 

 types, and the re-partition of each group ; whilst, in one word, 

 it exactly accounted for all the known facts, the opposite doc- 

 trine moved in a circle of contradictory suppositions super- 



