OF THE HUMAN RACE. 



203 



could have allowed himself to be for one moment imposed upon by a mass 

 of trash so absurd and extravagant as not to be worth the trouble of confut- 

 ing. Such romances are certainly in existence ; but they are nothing more 

 than the fabled news of a few low and illiterate mariners, whose names 

 were never sufficient to give them the slightest degree of authority, even 

 when they were first uttered; and which, for tlie most part, dropped succes- 

 sively into an obscure and ignominous grave on the moment of their birth, 

 and would have silently mouldered away into their elemental nothingness, 

 had not this very singular writer chosen to rake up their decomposing atoms, 

 in order to support an hypothesis which sufficiently proves its own weak- 

 ness by the scouted and extravagant evidence to which it is compelled to 

 appeal. 



Of the wild men and wild women of Linnaeus, some appear to have been 

 ideots, escaped from their keepers ; a few exaggerated accounts of stray 

 children from some wretched hovel of Lithuanian peasants ; and one of them, 

 a young negress, who, during a shipwreck on the French coast, had swam 

 on shore, and at once saved herself from death, and, what is worse than 

 death, from slavery. She is said to have been found in the woods of Cham- 

 pagne, about the middle of the last century, and was at first exhibited under 

 the name of la Jille sauvage and la belle sauvage ; and had the honour, soon 

 afterward, of being painted as a sigu-post to one of our most celebrated inns 

 in this metropolis, which is still known by the name of the Bell Savage. 

 This young negress was instructed in the French language by the family into 

 whose hospitable hands she fell, and was afterward, from some unaccount- 

 able whim, denominated Mademoiselle le Blanc* 



In order, however, to settle this question completely, let me mention a few 

 of the anatomical points in which the orang-otang differs from the human 

 form, and which cannot possibly be the effect of a mere variety, but must 

 necessarily flow from an original and inherent distinction. More might be 

 added, but what I shall offer will be sufficient ; and if 1 do not touch upon a 

 comparison of the interior faculties, it is merely because I will neither insult 

 your understandings nor degrade my own, by bringing them into any kind of 

 contact. 



Both the orang and pongo, which of all the monkey tribes make the nearest 

 approach to the structure of the human skeleton, have three vertebrae fewer 

 than man. They have a peculiar membranous pouch connected with the 

 larynx or organ of the voice, which belongs to no division of man whatever, 

 white or black. The larynx itself is, in consequence of this, so peculiarly 

 constructed as to render it less capable even of inarti(;ulate sounds than that 

 of almost every other kind of quadruped : and, lastly, they have no proper 

 feet ; for what are so called are, in reality, as directly hands as the terminal 

 organs of the arms : the great toe in man, and that which chiefly enables him 

 to walk in an erect position, being a perfect thumb in the orang-otang. 

 Whence this animal is naturally formed for climbing : and its natural posi- 

 tion in walking, and the position which it always assumes excepting when 

 under discipline, is that of all-fours ; the body being supported on four hands, 

 instead of on four feet as in quadrupeds. And it is owing to this wide and 

 essential difference, as, indeed, we had occasion to observe in our last study, 

 that M. Cuvier, and other zoologists of the present day, have thought it ex- 

 pedient to invent a new name by which the monkey and maucauco tribes may 

 be distinguished from all the rest ; and, instead of quadrupeds, have called them 

 QUADRUMANA, or QUADRUMANUALs ; by which they are at the same time equally 

 distinguished from every tribe of the human race, which are uniformly, and 

 alone, bimanual. 



But throwing the monkey ^kind out of the question, as in no respect related 

 to the race of man, it must at least be admitted, contend the second class of 

 philosophers before us, that the wide differences in form, and colour, and 

 degree of intellect, which the several divisions of mankind exhibit, as you 



• MbnlWldo on the Origin of Langiiagiei, &t5. vdl. I. p; 193, 480. 



