and future Prospects. 5 189 



the fossil and living horse, the fossil and living dog, &c, was obvious ; 

 so with many of the bears, carnivora, &c. : now this difficulty he might 

 at once have repelled by pointing to the resemblance of the skeletons 

 of the horse and ass, which yet form species absolutely distinct. 

 But to have used this argument was to employ a double-edged 

 sword, to be rapidly turned against himself, upsetting much of his 

 anatomical researches, and his great aim of proving, upon anatomical 

 grounds, that the fossil and living worlds were absolutely distinct. 

 Again, when Huet and other distinguished palaeontologists and 

 geologists, pointed out to him the undoubted discovery of the 

 remains of man himself in geological positions, the vast antiquity of 

 which could not be doubted, and the simultaneous occurrence of 

 these remains, both with the recent and the extinct world, thus 

 seemingly uniting all in one series ; Cuvier was silent on such 

 occasions, and his silence was very naturally respected by the 

 Academy. Thus, long prior to his death, the illustrious man must 

 have foreseen that he had opened up a fountain of discovery, to the 

 flow of which man could set no limits. If man succeeds better with 

 the ox and horse, the dog and sheep, the rabbit and pigeon, it is be- 

 cause in these genera there are several species, by the combining of 

 which breeds (not races) are obtained, showing those numerous 

 varieties which modern naturalists* mistake for races, — which men 

 maintain for a time by force of circumstances, — which, unless thus 

 maintained, have a constant tendency to revert to the primitive species 

 from which they sprang. As with animals, so with man. South 

 America, conquered by Spain and- Portugal, in other words, by the 

 Lusitanian, Celtiberian and Iberian races of man, witnessed the 

 growth, for a century or two, of a heterogeneous population, some- 

 what analogous to our mixed breeds of sheep and oxen, horses and 

 dogs; and now that the European race ceases to emigrate to that 

 land, the artificial, forced, unnatural and unleavened mass frees itself 

 of the accessory and accidental elements, — the Mulatto dies out, as 

 he must always do ; the pure white and the Indian, the Negro and 

 the Carib, return to what they were. If man has reason to boast of 

 his mixed breeds of cattle, the world has but small reason for congra- 

 tulation in the production of mixed breeds of men. Look at the 

 savage cut-throats who have desolated South America, the so-called 

 Mexicans and Peruvians, the Monte-Vidians and Buenos-Ayreans (as 

 if there ever was, or ever could be, any such races), and admit that, 

 unlike those of the West, whatever be the faults and foibles of the 

 pure races, they are at least intelligible to humanity. 



But we have been drawn away from the simple question of fixity of 

 race or species, which Cuvier and De Blainville, though in different 

 ways, maintained, and which Geoffroy and the German school as 

 stoutly denied. The possible existence of a hybrid species was long 

 ago denied in this country ,f and the assertion has received the sup- 



* Fleurens, &c. 



t 'The Races of Men: a Fragment,' by R. Knox. 

 XY. U 



