226 
THE DESCENT OF MAN. 
Part I. 
peculiarities, more strongly marked than those occur- 
ring in any other race, but these are known not to 
be of constant occurrence. In the several American 
tribes, colour and hairyness differ considerably ; as does 
colour to a certain degree, and the shape of the features 
greatly, in the Negroes of Africa. The shape of the 
skull varies much in some races ; 16 and so it is with 
every other character. Now all naturalists have learnt 
by dearly-bought experience, how rash it is to attempt 
to define species by the aid of inconstant characters. 
But the most weighty of all the arguments against 
treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they 
graduate into each other, independently in many cases, 
as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed. 
Man has been studied more carefully than any other 
organic being, and yet there is the greatest possible 
diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be 
classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as 
three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbacli), 
six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven 
(Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Des- 
moulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as 
sixty-three, according to Burke . 17 This diversity of 
judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be 
ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into 
each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover 
clear distinctive characters between them. 
Every naturalist who has had the misfortune to under- 
16 For instance with the aborigines of America and Australia. Prof. 
Huxley says (‘ Transact. Internat. Congress of Prehist. Arch.’ 1868, p. 
105) that the skulls of many South Germans and Swiss are “as short 
“ and as broad as those of the Tartars,” &c. 
17 See a good discussion on this subject in Waltz, ‘ Introduct. to 
Anthropology/ Eng. translat. 1863, p. 198-208, 227. I have taken 
some of the above statements from H. Tuttle’s 4 Origin and Antiquity 
of Physical Man/ Boston, 1866, p. 35. 
