10 LECTUEE I. 



preface of every new work lie publishes, but wliicli seems not 

 to have advanced further than a collection of materials, such 

 an ideal, I repeat, would undoubtedly comprise a close exami- 

 nation of all racial brains, founded on minute dissection. But 

 we are as yet far from such a consummation. Here and there 

 some European anatomist succeeds in obtaining a black sub- 

 ject for dissection, but want of acquaintance with his genea- 

 logy, which can only be traced through one or two generations* 

 of slaves imported from Africa, may give rise to the suspicion 

 that transportation into another chmate, and the change in 

 mode of life and civilisation, may already have modified the 

 original structure of the body, and specially of the brain as the 

 organ of mental activity. 



You will from these few remarks easily form some concep- 

 tion of the difficulties under which the naturahst labours, in 

 the process of determining not merely the physical but also the 

 psychological nature of man. The material is only obtained 

 in scanty fragments, and these are capable of elaboration in 

 so many different ways, that the labours of predecessors cannot 

 always be appropriated. 



When, having overcome these difficulties and procured some 

 materials, we try to apply the results obtained, there rise 

 from the depth of society other phantoms which must be com- 

 bated. The whole inherent pride of human nature revolts at 

 the idea that the lord of the creation is to be treated like any 

 other natural object. f No sooner does the naturalist discover 

 the resemblance of some higher mammals, such as the ape, to 

 man, than there is a general outcry against the presumptuous au- 

 dacity that ventures to touch man in his inmost sanctuary. The 

 whole fraternity of philosophers, who have never seen monkeys 

 except in zoological gardens, at once mount the high horse, 

 and appeal to the mind, the soul, to reason, to consciousness, 

 and to all the rest of the innate faculties of man, as they are 

 refracted in their own philosophical prisms. This mode of 



* And even then witli no certainty.— Editor. 



t This, no doubt, is quite true of the masses of mankind ; but such feel- 

 ings are not shared in by either the philosophic or the truly scientific mind.— 

 Editor. 



