228 PHYSICAL INVESTIGATION, [PART I. 



Bory 1 recognizes in Mexico, in spite of the number of pro* 

 ceding intermixtures, still the type of the Americans, and the 

 diversities of the inhabitants of the west coast from the other 

 native Americans; and Nott and Gliddon 2 recognize, upon 

 some of the oldest monuments of Egypt, already a very mixed 

 people. We are almost tempted to ask them, How they know 

 that God has not originally created some mixed types ? 



The proper definition of physical characters of races and 

 peoples is as yet deficient in scientific precision. The practised 

 eye generally decides on resemblance and dissimilarity. Hence 

 there has slipped in a sort of mysterious augur-wisdom in our 

 science, a knowledge resting more upon feeling and a kind of 

 artistic intuition than upon fixed rules, upon an indefinite 

 something which was only manifested to the connoisseur. Thus 

 the door was opened to quackery which does not fail to make 

 itself felt. An investigation of the facts leads us to the infer- 

 ence, that as it certainly cannot occur to any ethnographer to 

 separate in the lands of the Moors, the Berber, Gothic, Phoeni- 

 cian, Roman, Greek elements, etc., according to cranial shape, 

 or to distinguish in Greece the Slavonian and Hellenic elements, 

 it is certain that the absolute permanence of the physical type 

 is nothing but a prejudice, possessing no scientific title what- 

 ever to serve as a basis for the assumption of a plurality of 

 human species. 



Whatever number of principal types of mankind may be 

 assumed, if they are considered as specifically different, it be- 

 comes always requisite with regard to the peoples belonging to 

 these original types to admit either a relatively considerable 

 mutability of the type by external and internal influences, as 

 every people has its own peculiarities, or else to admit an in- 

 termixture of species. In the first case, the power of these in- 

 fluences is strictly limited by the assumption of species, limits, 

 the fixing of which is purely arbitrary : in the second case, in 

 which all changes are reduced to intermixture alone, we add to 

 the great improbability contained in the assertion, that nearly 



1 Vol. i, p. 274. 2 p a g e 2 33. 



