PERPETUATION OF LIVING BFJli 118 



natural species, I might appeal to the universal experi- 

 ence of every naturalist, and of any person who lias 

 ever turned any attention at all to the characteristics 

 of plants and animals in a state of nature; but I may 

 as well take a few definite cases, and I will begin with 

 Man himself. 



• I am one of those who believe that, at present, there 

 is no evidence whatever for saying:, that mankind sprang 

 originally from any more than a single pair ; I must Bay, 

 that I cannot see any good ground whatever, or even 

 any tenable sort of evidence, for believing that there 

 is more than one species of Man. Nevertheless, as you 

 know , just as there are numbers of varieties in animals, 

 so there are remarkable varieties of men. I speak not 

 merely of those broad and distinct variations' which 

 you see at a glance. Everybody, of course, knows the 

 difference between a Negro and a white man, and can tell 

 a Chinaman from an Englishman. They each have pecu- 

 liar characteristics of colour and physiognomy ; but you 

 must recollect that the characters of these races go very 

 far deeper — they extend to the bony structure, and to 

 the characters of that most important of all organs to 

 us — the brain ; so that, among men belonging to differ- 

 ent races, or even within the same race, one man shall 

 have a brain a third, or half, or even seventy per cent, 

 bigger than another ; and if you take the whole range 

 of human brains, you will find a variation in some cases 

 of a hundred per cent. Apart from these variations 

 in the size of the brain, the characters of the skull vary. 

 Thus if I draw the figures of a Mongul and a Negro 

 head on the blackboard, in the case of the last the 

 breadth would be about seven-tenths, and in the other 

 it would be nine-tenths of the total length. So 



