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CHAPTER VIII. 



SPECIES. 



WE have now arrived at the limits of the task which we pro- 

 posed to attempt, and we hope, after what has gone before, 

 that we shall be able to arrive at some scientific conclusion. 



After having endeavoured to establish in the introduction 

 the route we had to follow in anthropological studies, we gave 

 an account of the system of purely philosophic researches, 

 putting every foreign or prejudicial idea on one side, and, rest- 

 ing on facts and on mathematical reasoning, we have endea- 

 voured to apply these principles. We endeavoured at first to 

 prove that man was not a being as foreign and superior to the 

 rest of animal nature, as certain naturalists have thought, 

 taking themselves, the first from among men, as the point of 

 comparison. We have considered the inferior races, and we 

 have shown that between these and the first animals the dis- 

 tance was neither absolute nor well-defined; that man came 

 into the zoological series, and that he only forms definitively a 

 separate family. Changing our direction, we abandoned this 

 acquired knowledge, and we passed on to the study of varieties 

 among men ; we found them profound, indeed, and of every 

 description. 



Then came the study of the influences to which man may 

 be subjected. We saw that hybridity did not play any serious 

 part in this, since it could only weaken pre-existing differences. 

 On the other hand, we have acknowledged that in the limits of 

 time accessible to our knoivledge, nothing justified the hypo- 

 thesis, that climate had such an extensive influence in changing 

 man so as to make the differences which we may observe be- 



