PHILOLOGICAL VARIETIES. 73 



so great and insurmountable, it must be overcome, it must be 

 passed in the name of an admitted principle, cost what it may 

 so to do. Thus it is that monogenists have sometimes arrived 

 at the most curious, but at the same time most unfortunate, 

 results. 



And if we wished to form sentiment from science, we should 

 ask, which is the most reasonable, the most worthy, and the 

 most consoling, whether to believe that we alone are perfect, 

 and that nine-tenths of our brethren who cover the globe are 

 disinherited ; or to consider all these varied existences which 

 we see around us as forming equal, if not similar, species, pur- 

 suing, each in its own way, a destiny, different, indeed, but 

 not degraded, not degenerated, in certain points even better 

 arranged than our own. ' ' God," said Niebuhr, ' ' has marked 

 on each race of men their destination with the characteristic 

 which best suits them ;" and the philosopher had already learnt | 

 by history that when civilisation has been suddenly introduced I 

 from without among a savage nation,* the consequence is an I 

 immediate physical degeneracy, that is to say, the destruction ! 

 of the people which has wandered from its usual mode of life. 

 The historian thus proclaimed a physiological law, which most 

 monogenists are glad to forget, that all degeneracy ends ne- 

 cessarily in death ; it kills itself, and always at the tenth gene- 

 ration, if not at the first. No group of human beings, after 

 two or three generations of unmixed existence, can be con- 

 sidered as degraded or degenerated, not more than we should 

 admit that a young girl, attacked with cretinism in its greatest 

 degree, had the characteristics of the Esquimaux or the Mon- 

 golian race.f 



We can see, even in a humanitarian point 1 of view, the 

 point of view in which we refuse to place ourselves, that 

 the polygenists have the advantage. The mind is not of- 

 fended, and cannot be so, to see 'certain creatures possess 

 some particular faculty to the exclusion of others. Does not ' 



* Niebuhr quoted, in support of this, the Nalhkis and the Guaranis in the 

 New Californian and Cape Missions. Schlegel (Essais, p. 341, Paris, 1841) 

 declares, that most savage nations ought always to remain so by the will of 

 nature. 



f See Comptes rendus de I' Academic des Sciences, meeting of July 20, 1857. 



