98 THE INFLUENCE OF IIYBRTDITY. 



Isidore Grcoffroy seems to us to have, in his turn, fallen into a 

 contradiction of the same kind. He especially calls hybrids 

 the crosses which occur from the cross of two different species, 

 and he remarks, besides, that hybrids have generally tolerably 

 decided characteristics, which are partly those of the father and 

 partly those of the mother; so that the offspring, he adds, 

 can resemble one more than the other, but not exclusively 

 either of them : the cross is always to be found in it. On the 

 contrary, it is not always so with the cross between two 

 varieties of the same species ; the produce has often the cha- 

 racteristics of both its parents, but very frequently, also, it 

 resembles one of them exclusively. 



For these beings who are the offspring of two varieties of 

 the same species, and who very frequently reproduce entire the 

 1 1//><>, of one of their parents to the exclusion of the other, Isi- 

 dore Geoffroy reserved the name of homo'ides. Well, we ask 

 him this, in taking, as an example, the offspring of a union 

 between a white and a black, shall we find in it the character- 

 istics of a homoid cross ? Will it never resemble exclusively 

 one of the two founders ? Are not the characteristics of the 

 Mulatto perfectly represented, perfectly defined, and always 

 medium ? Are not exceptions, if any can be quoted, of ex- 

 treme rarity ?* In the name of this consistency, ought not 

 Isidore Geoffroy to have seen in a Mulatto something besides 

 a homoid mongrel, and to doubt even more that the different 

 races of mankind constituted only varieties of the same 

 species ? 



However, let us examine into hybridity so far as it may 

 serve to produce new, or modify existing races, as Blumenbach 

 and Flourens have admitted. t Let us only remark that these 

 two authors, like most monogenists, in placing hybridity, as 

 (In- modifying cause, in the same rank as climate or medium, 

 commit a givjil error. Hybridity, even in giving it the creative 

 power which some have desired, goes entirely into the second 

 rank, for it supposes a pre-existing plurality. It can only act, 

 in the end, by weakening differences, by creating a middle 



*' Perier, Socitt? d' Anthropologie, meeting of April 21, 1864. 

 f Des Rfi,ces Humaincs, IS 45. 



