

SYSTEM. 149 



up all other methods. It is easy to convince oneself of the fact 

 by examining the coloured portraits which illustrate the works 

 of Prichard,* Nott, and Grliddon,f who are, however, extremely 

 particular about the correctness of the types which they 

 bring before our notice. But all these coloured portraits are 

 unsatisfactory, and when we see some anthropologist invoke 

 the authority of these bad prints, we really ask ourselves 

 which we ought most to admire, either the blind confidence of 

 the savant, the imprudence of the author, or the rashness of the 

 artist. Fancy, however, attacking with such platitudes the 

 portraits of dark-coloured men which the masters of painting 

 have left us, from Veronese to Gericault ! They alone have 

 been able, by their process, to seize the reality of the com- 

 plexion and colour of their models .J 



But the surest method of arriving at conclusive evidence in 

 anthropology is necessarily travels. Doubtless the study alone 

 of the materials collected from afar is of the greatest possible 

 use. But we repeat concerning the study of mankind what 

 we said about the study of animals ; the anthropologist must 

 leave his library and go into the great continents, in order to 

 study by means of his own eye-sight. " We can only arrive 

 at the distinction of species/'' says M. Flourens, "by direct 

 and complete personal observation" That it must be complete, 

 we have endeavoured to show ; but the only condition for its 

 being complete is its being direct. Had we even the genius 

 of Buffon, we should see but poorly by means of others ; facts 

 reach us distorted and altered, because they have not always 

 been observed by competent men ; they are not comparable, 



* See The Natural History of Han, 1844. 



f See Ethnographic Tableau (Indigenous Races of the Earth, London, 

 1857). 



J We may quote, as types of genus, two paintings, incomparable in an 

 anthropological point of view, Portrait d'un Negre ; Portrait d'un Oriental, 

 by Herschop (Berlin Museum, Nos. 825 and 827). 



M. Flourens, in saying that Buffon collected the accounts of different 

 travellers in order to write his Histoire des Races, adds, " Whatever they have 

 only seen with the eyes of their body, he sees with the eyes of his mind, and 

 by that means alone he sees better than they can ; each of them has seen 

 merely some scattered characteristics, Buffon sees everything ; he links to- 

 gether whatever they may have separated, and separates whatever they have 

 confounded." Histoire des Idces de Buffon, p. 167. 



