Critiques and Addresses Part 11

To sum up our knowledge of the ethnological past of man: so far as the light is bright, it shows him substantially as he is now; and, when it grows dim, it permits us to see no sign that he was other than he is now.

It is a general belief that men of different stocks differ as much physiologically as they do morphologically; but it is very hard to prove, in any particular case, how much of a supposed national characteristic is due to inherent physiological peculiarities, and how much to the influence of circ.u.mstances. There is much evidence to show, however, that some stocks enjoy a partial or complete immunity from diseases which destroy, or decimate, others. Thus there seems good ground for the belief that Negroes are remarkably exempt from yellow fever; and that, among Europeans, the melanochrous people are less obnoxious to its ravages than the xanthochrous. But many writers, not content with physiological differences of this kind, undertake to prove the existence of others of far greater moment; and, indeed, to show that certain stocks of mankind exhibit, more or less distinctly, the physiological characters of true species. Unions between these stocks, and still more between the half-breeds arising from their mixture, are affirmed to be either infertile, or less fertile than those which take place between males and females of either stock under the same circ.u.mstances. Some go so far as to a.s.sert that no mixed breeds of mankind can maintain themselves without the a.s.sistance of one or other of the parent stocks, and that, consequently, they must inevitably be obliterated in the long run.

Here, again, it is exceedingly difficult to obtain trustworthy evidence, and to free the effects of the pure physiological experiment from advent.i.tious influences. The only trial which, by a strange chance, was kept clear of all such influences--the only instance in which two distinct stocks of mankind were crossed, and their progeny intermarried without any admixture from without--is the famous case of the Pitcairn Islanders, who were the progeny of Bligh's English sailors by Tahitian women. The results of this experiment, as everybody knows, are dead against those who maintain the doctrine of human hybridity, seeing that the Pitcairn Islanders, even though they necessarily contracted consanguineous marriages, throve and multiplied exceedingly.

But those who are disposed to believe in this doctrine should study the evidence brought forward in its support by M. Broca, its latest and ablest advocate, and compare this evidence with that which the botanists, as represented by a Gaertner, or by a Darwin, think it indispensable to obtain before they will admit the infertility of crosses between two allied kinds of plants. They will then, I think, be satisfied that the doctrine in question rests upon a very unsafe foundation; that the facts adduced in its support are capable of many other interpretations; and, indeed, that from the very nature of the case, demonstrative evidence one way or the other is almost unattainable. _A priori_, I should be disposed to expect a certain amount of infertility between some of the extreme modifications of mankind; and still more between the offsprings of their intermixture.

_A posteriori_, I cannot discover any satisfactory proof that such infertility exists.

From the facts of ethnology I now turn to the theories and speculations of ethnologists, which have been devised to explain these facts, and to furnish satisfactory answers to the inquiry--what conditions have determined the existence of the persistent modifications of mankind, and have caused their distribution to be what it is?

These speculations may be grouped under three heads: firstly, the Monogenist hypotheses; secondly, those of the Polygenists; and thirdly, that which would result from a simple application of Darwinian principles to mankind.

According to the Monogenists, all mankind have sprung from a single pair, whose mult.i.tudinous progeny spread themselves over the world, such as it now is, and became modified into the forms we meet with in the various regions of the earth, by the effect of the climatal and other conditions to which they were subjected.

The advocates of this hypothesis are divisible into several schools.

There are those who represent the most numerous, respectable, and would-be orthodox of the public, and are what may be called "Adamites," pure and simple. They believe that Adam was made out of earth somewhere in Asia, about six thousand years ago; that Eve was modelled from one of his ribs; and that the progeny of these two having been reduced to the eight persons who were landed on the summit of Mount Ararat after an universal deluge, all the nations of the earth have proceeded from these last, have migrated to their present localities, and have become converted into Negroes, Australians, Mongolians, &c., within that time. Five-sixths of the public are taught this Adamitic Monogenism, as if it were an established truth, and believe it. I do not; and I am not acquainted with any man of science, or duly instructed person, who does.

A second school of monogenists, not worthy of much attention, attempts to hold a place midway between the Adamites and a third division, who take up a purely scientific position, and require to be dealt with accordingly. This third division, in fact, numbers in its ranks Linnaeus, Buffon, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Prichard, and many distinguished living ethnologists.

These "Rational Monogenists," or, at any rate, the more modern among them, hold, firstly, that the present condition of the earth has existed for untold ages; secondly, that, at a remote period, beyond the ken of Archbishop Usher, man was created, somewhere between the Caucasus and the Hindoo Koosh; thirdly, that he might have migrated thence to all parts of the inhabited world, seeing that none of them are unattainable from some other inhabited part, by men provided with only such means of transport as savages are known to possess and must have invented; fourthly, that the operation of the existing diversities of climate and other conditions upon people so migrating, is sufficient to account for all the diversities of mankind.

Of the truth of the first of these propositions no competent judge now entertains any doubt. The second is more open to discussion, for in these latter days many question the special creation of man: and even if his special creation be granted, there is not a shadow of a reason why he should have been created in Asia rather than anywhere else.

Of all the odd myths that have arisen in the scientific world, the "Caucasian mystery," invented quite innocently by Blumenbach, is the oddest. A Georgian woman's skull was the handsomest in his collection.

Hence it became his model exemplar of human skulls, from which all others might be regarded as deviations; and out of this, by some strange intellectual hocus-pocus, grew up the notion that the Caucasian man is the prototypic "Adamic" man, and his country the primitive centre of our kind. Perhaps the most curious thing of all is, that the said Georgian skull, after all, is not a skull of average form, but distinctly belongs to the brachycephalic group.

With the third proposition I am quite disposed to agree, though it must be recollected that it is one thing to allow that a given migration is possible, and another to admit there is good reason to believe it has really taken place.

But I can find no sufficient ground for accepting the fourth proposition; and I doubt if it would ever have obtained its general currency except for the circ.u.mstance that fair Europeans are very readily tanned and embrowned by the sun. But I am not aware that there is a particle of proof that the cutaneous change thus effected can become hereditary, any more than that the enlarged livers, which plague our countrymen in India, can be transmitted;--while there is very strong evidence to the contrary. Not only, in fact, are there such cases as those of the English families in Barbadoes, who have remained for six generations unaltered in complexion, but which are open to the objection that they may have received infusions of fresh European blood; but there is the broad fact, that not a single indigenous Negro exists either in the great alluvial plains of tropical South America, or in the exposed islands of the Polynesian Archipelago, or among the populations of equatorial Borneo or Sumatra.

No satisfactory explanation of these obvious difficulties has been offered by the advocates of the direct influence of conditions. And as for the more important modifications observed in the structure of the brain, and in the form of the skull, no one has ever pretended to show in what way they can be effected directly by climate.

It is here, in fact, that the strength of the Polygenists, or those who maintain that men primitively arose, not from one, but from many stocks, lies. Show us, they say to the Monogenists, a single case in which the characters of a human stock have been essentially modified without its being demonstrable, or, at least, highly probable, that there has been intermixture of blood with some foreign stock. Bring forward any instance in which a part of the world, formerly inhabited by one stock, is now the dwelling-place of another, and we will prove the change to be the result of migration, or of intermixture, and not of modification of character by climatic influences. Finally, prove to us that the evidence in favour of the specific distinctness of many animals, admitted to be distinct species by all zoologists, is a whit better than that upon which we maintain the specific distinctness of men.

If presenting unanswerable objections to your adversary were the same thing as proving your own case, the Polygenists would be in a fair way towards victory; but, unfortunately, as I have already observed, they have as yet completely failed to adduce satisfactory positive proof of the specific diversity of mankind. Like the Monogenists, the Polygenists are of several sects; some imagine that their a.s.sumed species of mankind were created where we find them--the African in Africa, and the Australian in Australia, along with the other animals of their distributional province; others conceive that each species of man has resulted from the modification of some antecedent species of ape--the American from the broad-nosed Simians of the New World, the African from the Troglodytic stock, the Mongolian from the Orangs.

The first hypothesis is hardly likely to win much favour. The whole tendency of modern science is to thrust the origination of things further and further into the background; and the chief philosophical objection to Adam being, not his oneness, but the hypothesis of his special creation; the multiplication of that objection tenfold is, whatever it may look, an increase, instead of a diminution, of the difficulties of the case. And, as to the second alternative, it may safely be affirmed that, even if the differences between men are specific, they are so small, that the a.s.sumption of more than one primitive stock for all is altogether superfluous. Surely no one can now be found to a.s.sert that any two stocks of mankind differ as much as a chimpanzee and an orang do; still less that they are as unlike as either of these is to any New World Simian!

Lastly, the granting of the Polygenist premises does not, in the slightest degree, necessitate the Polygenist conclusion. Admit that Negroes and Australians, Negritos and Mongols are distinct species, or distinct genera, if you will, and you may yet, with perfect consistency, be the strictest of Monogenists, and even believe in Adam and Eve as the primaeval parents of all mankind.

It is to Mr. Darwin we owe this discovery: it is he who, coming forward in the guise of an eclectic philosopher, presents his doctrine as the key to ethnology, and as reconciling and combining all that is good in the Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools.

It is true that Mr. Darwin has not, in so many words, applied his views to ethnology; but even he who "runs and reads" the "Origin of Species" can hardly fail to do so; and, furthermore, Mr. Wallace and M. Pouchet have recently treated of ethnological questions from this point of view. Let me, in conclusion, add my own contribution to the same store.

I a.s.sume Man to have arisen in the manner which I have discussed elsewhere, and probably, though by no means necessarily, in one locality. Whether he arose singly, or a number of examples appeared contemporaneously, is also an open question for the believer in the production of species by the gradual modification of pre-existing ones. At what epoch of the world's history this took place, again, we have no evidence whatever. It may have been in the older tertiary, or earlier, but what is most important to remember is, that the discoveries of late years have proved that man inhabited Western Europe, at any rate, before the occurrence of those great physical changes which have given Europe its present aspect. And as the same evidence shows that man was the contemporary of animals which are now extinct, it is not too much to a.s.sume that his existence dates back at least as far as that of our present Fauna and Flora, or before the epoch of the drift.

But if this be true, it is somewhat startling to reflect upon the prodigious changes which have taken place in the physical geography of this planet since man has been an occupant of it.

During that period the greater part of the British islands, of Central Europe, of Northern Asia, have been submerged beneath the sea and raised up again. So has the great desert of Sahara, which occupies the major part of Northern Africa. The Caspian and the Aral seas have been one, and their united waters have probably communicated with both the Arctic and the Mediterranean oceans. The greater part of North America has been under water, and has emerged. It is highly probable that a large part of the Malayan Archipelago has sunk, and its primitive continuity with Asia has been destroyed. Over the great Polynesian area subsidence has taken place to the extent of many thousands of feet--subsidence of so vast a character, in fact, that if a continent like Asia had once occupied the area of the Pacific, the peaks of its mountains would now show not more numerous than the islands of the Polynesian Archipelago.

What lands may have been thickly populated for untold ages, and subsequently have disappeared and left no sign above the waters, it is of course impossible for us to say; but unless we are to make the wholly unjustifiable a.s.sumption that no dry land rose elsewhere when our present dry land sank, there must be half-a-dozen Atlantises beneath the waves of the various oceans of the world. But if the regions which have undergone these slow and gradual, but immense alterations, were wholly or in part inhabited before the changes I have indicated began--and it is more probable that they were, than that they were not--what a wonderfully efficient "Emigration Board"

must have been at work all over the world long before canoes, or even rafts, were invented; and before men were impelled to wander by any desire n.o.bler or stronger than hunger. And as these rude and primitive families were thrust, in the course of long series of generations, from land to land, impelled by encroachments of sea or of marsh, or by severity of summer heat or winter cold, to change their positions, what opportunities must have been offered for the play of natural selection, in preserving one family variation and destroying another!

Suppose, for example, that some families of a horde which had reached a land charged with the seeds of yellow fever, varied in the direction of woolliness of hair and darkness of skin. Then, if it be true that these physical characters are accompanied by comparative or absolute exemptions from that scourge, the inevitable tendency would be to the preservation and multiplication of the darker and woollier families, and the elimination of the whiter and smoother-haired. In fact, by the operation of causes precisely similar to those which, in the famous instance cited by Mr. Darwin, have given rise to a race of black pigs in the forests of Louisiana, a negro stock would eventually people the region.

Again, how often, by such physical changes, must a stock have been isolated from all others for innumerable generations, and have found ample time for the hereditary hardening of its special peculiarities into the enduring characters of a persistent modification.

Nor, if it be true that the physiological difference of species may be produced by variation and natural selection, as Mr. Darwin supposes, would it be at all astonis.h.i.+ng if, in some of these separated stocks, the process of differentiation should have gone so far as to give rise to the phenomena of hybridity. In the face of the overwhelming evidence in favour of the unity of the origin of mankind afforded by anatomical considerations, satisfactory proof of the existence of any degree of sterility in the unions of members of two of the "persistent modifications" of mankind, might well be appealed to by Mr. Darwin as crucial evidence of the truth of his views regarding the origin of species in general.

VIII.

ON SOME FIXED POINTS IN BRITISH ETHNOLOGY.

In view of the many discussions to which the complicated problems offered by the ethnology of the British Islands have given rise, it may be useful to attempt to pick out, from amidst the confused ma.s.ses of a.s.sertion and of inference, those propositions which appear to rest upon a secure foundation, and to state the evidence by which they are supported. Such is the purpose of the present paper.

Some of these well-based propositions relate to the physical characters of the people of Britain and their neighbours; while others concern the languages which they spoke. I shall deal, in the first place, with the physical questions.

I. _Eighteen hundred years ago the population of Britain comprised people of two types of complexion--the one fair, and the other dark.

The dark people resembled the Aquitani and the Iberians; the fair people were like the Belgic Gauls._

The chief direct evidence of the truth of this proposition is the well-known pa.s.sage of Tacitus:--

"Ceterum Britanniam qui mortales initio coluerint, indigenae an advecti, ut inter barbaros, parum compertum. Habitus corporum varii: atque ex eo argumenta: nam rutilae Caledoniam habitantium comae, magni artus Germanicam originem a.s.severant.

Silurum colorati vultus et torti plerumque crines, et posita contra Hispaniam, Iberos veteres trajecisse, easque sedes occupa.s.se, fidem faciunt. Proximi Gallis et similes sunt; seu durante originis vi, seu procurrentibus in diversa terris, positio coeli corporibus habitum dedit. In universum tamen aestimanti, Gallos vicinum solum occupa.s.se, credibile est; eorum sacra deprehendas, superst.i.tionum persuasione; sermo haud multum diversus."[1]

[Footnote 1: Taciti Agricola, c. 11.]

This pa.s.sage, it will be observed, contains statements as to facts, and certain conclusions deduced from these facts. The matters of fact a.s.serted are: firstly, that the inhabitants of Britain exhibit much diversity in their physical characters; secondly, that the Caledonians are red-haired and large-limbed, like the Germans; thirdly, that the Silures have curly hair and dark complexions, like the people of Spain; fourthly, that the British people nearest Gaul resemble the "Galli."

Tacitus, therefore, states positively what the Caledonians and Silures were like; but the interpretation of what he says about the other Britons must depend upon what we learn from other sources as to the characters of these "Galli." Here the testimony of "divus Julius"

comes in with great force and appropriateness. Caesar writes:--

"Britanniae pars interior ab iis incolitur, quos natos in insula ipsi memoria proditum dic.u.n.t: marituma pars ab iis, qui predae ac belli inferendi causa ex Belgio transierant; qui omnes fere iis nominibus civitatum appellantur quibus orti ex civitatibus eo pervenerunt, et bello inlato ibi permanserunt atque agros colere coeperunt."[1]

[Footnote 1: De Bello Gallico, v. 12.]

From these pa.s.sages it is obvious that in the opinion of Caesar and Tacitus, the southern Britons resembled the northern Gauls, and especially the Belgae; and the evidence of Strabo is decisive as to the characters in which the two people resembled one another: "The men (of Britain) are taller than the Kelts, with hair less yellow; they are slighter in their persons."[1]

[Footnote 1: "The Geography of Strabo." Translated by Hamilton and Falconer; v. 5.]

The evidence adduced appears to leave no reasonable ground for doubting that, at the time of the Roman conquest, Britain contained people of two types, the one dark and the other fair complexioned, and that there was a certain difference between the latter in the north and in the south of Britain: the northern folk being, in the judgment of Tacitus, or, more properly, according to the information he had received from Agricola and others, more similar to the Germans than the latter. As to the distribution of these stocks, all that is clear is, that the dark people were predominant in certain parts of the west of the southern half of Britain, while the fair stock appears to have furnished the chief elements of the population elsewhere.

No ancient writer troubled himself with measuring skulls, and therefore there is no direct evidence as to the cranial characters of the fair and the dark stocks. The indirect evidence is not very satisfactory. The tumuli of Britain of pre-Roman date have yielded two extremely different forms of skull, the one broad and the other long; and the same variety has been observed in the skulls of the ancient Gauls[1]. The suggestion is obvious that the one form of skull may have been a.s.sociated with the fair, and the other with the dark, complexion. But any conclusion of this kind is at once checked by the reflection that the extremes of long and short-headedness are to be met with among the fair inhabitants of Germany and of Scandinavia at the present day--the south-western Germans and the Swiss being markedly broad-headed, while the Scandinavians are as predominantly long-headed.

[Footnote 1: See Dr. Thurnam "On the Two princ.i.p.al Forms of Ancient British and Gaulish Skulls."]