Memoir of Samuel George Morton. 171 
-In the Crania Americana, published in 1839, now twelve 
years ago, he had expressed his doubt as to the origin of man- 
kind from a single pair, and he said, that ‘the prevalent belief is 
derived from the sacred writings, which, inthe literal and ob- 
vious interpretation, teach us that all mankind must have origin- 
ated from a single pair; whence it has been hastily and unne- 
cessarily inferred, that the differences now observable in mankind 
are owing, solely, to vicissitudes of climate, locality, habits o 
life, and various collateral circumstances.” And he asks whether 
man was not at once adapted by his Creator to the physical and 
moral circumstances in which he was to dwell upon the earth. 
He deems “that we are left to the reasonable conclusion that 
each race was adapted, from the beginning, to its peculiar local 
destination.”” 
You perceive that Dr. Morton here asserts the physical charac- 
teristics of different races, as Europeans and Negroes, for instance, 
to be independent of external causes, and so aboriginal; or that 
the white man and the Malay, the North American Indian and 
the Hottentot, are people who could not have descended from 
the same original pair. 
These views, which were forced upon him by an examination 
of the case, were not adopted without a reverent search of the 
sacred Scriptures. 
The question before him was not whether all mankind are 
brethren, in the sense of being of the same species and under the 
Same moral law, which as men they could not escape from being. 
It was a question relative to important facts in natural history and 
physiology. 2 
He could not geologically admit that the Noachian deluge 
could at once cover the whole of the earth’s surface; and he 
concluded that, if that great cataclysm which broke up the foun- 
tains of the deep, drowning vast extents of the earth, did leave 
some continents or parts of continents unsubmerged, the Serip- 
tures would be rather strengthened and confirmed in their au- 
thority and dignity, than robbed and diminished in these respects, 
by a true reconciliation with the facts of geology, paleontology, 
and ethnology. eee 
He thought the exceeding great populousness and the intel- 
lectual power and progress of the nations that existed at the 
founding of the pyramids, could be more reasonably accounted for 
by supposing a plural origin of pairs of the same moral stamp and 
Tesponsibility, power and destiny, than by the natural increase 
and dispersion possible in so short a time as elapsed between the 
submergence of the deluge ahd the founding of those vast struc- 
res at Gizeh, Abusir, and Daschur—edifices which, whether 
laid by the hands of Menes or Cheops, go back to a remote date, 
now chronologically determined, ' ig r 
