106 THE INFLUENCE OP HYBRIDITY. 



length that the mixture of races necessarily conducts mankind 

 to degradation and universal debasement. Cabanis had the 

 same ideas on the subject.* 



The supposition which Cabanis and M. de Gobineau have 

 taken up will, doubtless, never be realised. To admit that all 

 human races can reach a complete hybridity, would be to ad- 

 mit that each race is cosmopolite, which it is not. But at least 

 it remains true, that when two very different races are united, 

 we must not hope for anything good or durable from their 

 union. The same phenomenon happens, with the simple dif- 

 ference of intensity, when two different species of animals are 

 united. So the monogenists are astonished at such a result in 

 man, " a result quite contrary," says one of them,f ' ' to what 

 one generally expects in crossing a race." J The astonishment 

 of the learned man, of whom we speak, is explained easily 

 enough by the ideas which he holds of human races, where he 

 only sees degenerated varieties of the original type, preserved 

 by the European in its primitive purity. 



It is evident that in this monogenic hypothesis, which we 

 shall not touch on again, the union of one of these degenerated 

 races with the pure stock would be a sort of 7iygid consan- 

 guinity, and therefore favourable to the offspring. Here there 

 would happen something analogous to the practice of the pea- 

 sants in the cretin districts, who try to struggle against the 

 scourge by seeking for marriages in the plains, in order to 

 give purer blood to each generation. In a more general manner 

 it is evident that if we suppose two sets of people born of the 

 same stock, and that one of them, after various fortunes, after 

 having undergone fatal influences, should unite itself with the 

 other, which had remained unaltered, it is evident that the 



* Rapports du Physique et du Moral, vol. i, p. 484. 



f M. Morel, Traite des Deg6n6rescences. 



j [" All races of mankind intermix, they are fertile, producing cross-breeds, 

 mulattoes, mestizoes, etc., which again are productive. All human races 

 constitute, therefore, on physiological principles, but one species, which is 

 here identical with genus humanum." So thinks Professor Rudolph Wagner, 

 but his arguments are not very satisfactory. He refers varieties of race in 

 a great measure to climatic influence. See Creation of Man and Substance of 

 the Mind (Anthrop. Rev., vol. i, p. 229). EDITOR.] 



Compare Bulletins de la Socitte d' Anthropologie, vol. iii, p. 175. 



