THE HUMAN Si'ECIES. 207 



innumerable other influential conditions of existence, — con- 

 ditions that affect, though in a less degree, the typical structure, 

 the external appearance of Man, and that acquire a deep-seated 

 poAver over his intellectual faculties, in their possible develop- 

 ment, and, consequently, also in their contraction, externally 

 observable. Therefore, in reasoning upon them, we must be 

 guarded against certain prepossessions of self-esteem, which 

 the educated man of the bearded stock, and, indeed, mankind 

 in general, is apt to entertain of strangers; for the same ten- 

 dency is ever at work between nation and nation, and between 

 every sub-division of the human family, however formed. In 

 the description of characters, scientifically taken, we can only 

 point out what they are, without having the power of stating 

 what may be eventually evolved ; and though already assured, 

 even with the apparently most degraded nations, that moral 

 rectitude is fully understood, nay, often put in practice, by the 

 savage, to the disgrace of the rapacious Christian who visits 

 his abode ; not ashamed to use knowledge for the purpose of 

 deception and illusions for his own gain, though the conse- 

 quences carry destruction to his victims. When bearing in 

 mind what our own remote progenitors were, we must allow 

 that all men, and all races, bear within them the elements of a 

 measured perfectibility, probably as high as the Caucasian; 

 and it would be revolting to believe that the less gifted tribes 

 were predestined to perish beneath the conquering and all- 

 absorbing covetousness of European civilization, without an 

 enormous load of responsibility resting on the perpetrators. 

 Yet their fate appears to be scaled in many quarters, and 

 seems, by a preordained law, to be an effect of more mysterious 

 import than human reason can grasp.^ 



* Tiicrc is, however, a great distinction to be drawn between conquest 

 that brings amelioration with it to the masses of the vanquished, and 

 extermination, which leaves no remnant of a broken people. It seeras the 

 first condition is only awardable to the great typical stocks, effecting 

 incorporations among themselves ; the second almost invariably the lot of 

 the intermediate, which, in most favorable cases only, aie absorbed. 



