THE INFLUENCE OP CLIMATE. 81 



writing which, makes the Asiatics and the lost people of Central 

 America better than savages ; and if we were asked for a spe- 

 cific distinction with regard to intelligence between mankind 

 and animals, we should only be able to find it there. It will 

 be seen later that we are far from denying the influence of a 

 middle course ; but we maintain that every term of comparison 

 is wanting at the present day to show that man, since the most 

 distant historic periods, has ever shown less dissimilarities than 

 now. Most monogenists, disagreeing about the whole sys- 

 tem of modifying causes, agree generally in acknowledging 

 that climates and hybridity have a decisive creative influence 

 as regards races of men. These two kinds of influence alone 

 deserve our consideration. We shall commence by climate, 

 putting on one side, for the present, the study of the specious 

 question of hybridity, whose part is so badly understood by 

 those who believe that it creates varieties, when it can only 

 weaken differences. 



An important part in the means of alteration from one race 

 to another has been given, by Hippocrates, to external influ- 

 ences. He seems to have been the first to point this out, in 

 his Treatise on Air, Water, and Places* " The form, colour, 

 and manners of nations," says Polybius, " depend solely on 

 the diversity of climates."t I n general, the ancients believed 

 in the immediate and sudden influence of climate, so much so 

 that a stranger, at the end of a few years, would be completely 

 changed and altered to the type of the inhabitants of the same 

 place. 



In our days, Cabanis alone has dared to go so far as this.J 

 Some monogenists have simply enlarged Grecian theories, and 

 explained everything by the prolonged duration of the same 

 influences. Others have supposed that local changes in the at- 

 mospheric conditions of the world, anterior to the actual epoch, 

 were the cause. This is a sort of progress beyond the pre- 

 ceding hypothesis, in the sense that at least we must recognise 



* Compare Cabanis, Rapports du Physique et du Moral, 13th year, vol. ii, 

 p. 201 : Knox, The Races of Men, p. 82, London, 1850 : Morel, Degenerescences 

 de I'Espece Humaine, Paris, 1857. 



f See Beddoin in English Cyclopaedia : see, also, Vitruvius, book vi, ch. i. 



j Rapports du Physique et du Moral, 13th year, vol. ii, p. 294. 



