by admin » Sun Apr 11, 2021 2:53 am
CHAPTER XI: RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT
The unitarians say that the separation of the races is merely apparent, and due to local influences, such as are still at work, or to accidental variations of shape in the ancestor of some particular branch. All mankind is, for them, capable of the same improvement; the original type, though more or less disguised, persists in unabated strength, and the negro, the American savage, the Tungusian of Northern Siberia, can attain a beauty of outline equal to that of the European, and would do so, if they were brought up under similar conditions. This theory cannot be accepted.
We have seen above that the strongest scientific rampart of the unitarians lay in the fertility of human hybrids. Up to now, this has been very difficult to refute, but perhaps it will not always be so; at any rate, I should not think it worth while to pause over this argument if it were not supported by another, of a very different kind, which, I confess, gives me more concern. It is said that Genesis does not admit of a multiple origin for our species.
If the text is clear, positive, peremptory, and incontestable, we must bow our heads; the greatest doubts must yield, reason can only declare herself imperfect and inferior, the origin of mankind is single, and everything that seems to prove the contrary is merely a delusive appearance. It is better to let darkness gather round a point of scholarship, than to enter the lists against such an authority. But if the Bible is not explicit, if the Holy Scriptures, which were written to shed light on quite other questions than those of race, have been misunderstood, and if without doing them violence one can draw a different meaning from them, then I shall not hesitate to go forward.
We must, of course, acknowledge that Adam is the ancestor of the white race. The scriptures are evidently meant to be so understood, for the generations deriving from him are certainly white. This being admitted, there is nothing to show that, in the view of the first compilers of the Adamite genealogies, those outside the white race were counted as part of the species at all. Not a word is said about the yellow races, and it is only an arbitrary interpretation of the text that makes us regard the patriarch Ham as black. Of course the translators and commentators, in calling Adam the common ancestor of all men, have had to enrol among his descendants all the peoples who have lived since his time. According to them, the European nations are of the stock of Japhet, hither Asia was occupied by the Semites, and the regions of Africa by the Hamites, who are, as I say, unreasonably considered to be of negro origin. The whole scheme fits admirably together — for one part of the world. But what about the other part? It is simply left out.
For the moment, I do not insist on this line of argument. I do not wish to run counter to even literal interpretations of the text, if they are generally accepted. I will merely point out that we might, perhaps, doubt their value, without going beyond the limits imposed by the Church; and then I will ask whether we may admit the basic principle of the unitarians, such as it is, and yet somehow explain the facts otherwise than they do. In other words, I will simply ask whether independently of any question of an original unity or multiplicity, there may not exist the most radical and far-reaching differences, both physical and moral, between human races.
The racial identity of all the different kinds of dog is admitted by Frederic Cuvier among others;* [Annales du Museum, vol. xi, p. 458.] but no one would say that in all dogs, without distinction of species, we find the same shapes, instincts, habits, and qualities. The same is true of horses, bulls, bears, and the like. Everywhere we see identity of origin, diversity of everything else, a diversity so deep that it cannot be lost except by crossing, and even then the products do not return to a real identity of nature. On the other hand, so long as the race is kept pure, the special characteristics remain unchanged, and are reproduced for generations without any appreciable difference.
This fact, which is indisputable, has led some to ask whether in the various kinds of domestic animals we can recognize the shapes and instincts of the primitive stock. The question seems for ever insoluble. It is impossible to determine the form and nature of a primitive type, and to be certain how far the specimens we see to-day deviate from it. The same problem is raised in the case of a large number of vegetables. Man especially, whose origin offers a more interesting study than that of all the rest, seems to resist all explanation, from this point of view.
The different races have never doubted that the original ancestor of the whole species had precisely their own characteristics. On this point, and this alone, tradition is unanimous. The white peoples have made for themselves an Adam and an Eve that Blumenbach would have called Caucasian; whereas in the "Arabian Nights " — a book which, though apparently trivial, is a mine of true sayings and well-observed facts — we read that some negroes regard Adam and his wife as black, and since these were created in the image of God, God must also be black and the angels too, while the prophet of God was naturally too near divinity to show a white skin to his disciples.
Unhappily, modern science has been able to provide no clue to the labyrinth of the various opinions. No likely hypothesis has succeeded in lightening this darkness, and in all probability the human races are as different from their common ancestor, if they have one, as they are from each other. I will therefore assume without discussion the principle of unity; and my only task, in the narrow and limited field to which I am confining myself, is to explain the actual deviation from the primitive type.
The causes are very hard to disentangle. The theory of the unitarians attributes the deviation, as I have already said, to habits, climate, and locality. It is impossible to agree with this.* [The unitarians are continually bringing forward comparisons between man and the animals in support of their theory; I have just been using such a line of argument myself. It only applies, however, within limits, and I could not honestly avail myself of it in speaking of the modification of species by climate. In this respect the difference between man and the animals is radical and (one might almost say) specific. There is a geography of animals, as there is of plants; but there is no geography of man. It is only in certain latitudes that certain vegetables, mammals, reptiles, fishes, and molluscs can exist; man, in all his varieties, can live equally well everywhere. In the case of the animals this fully explains a vast number of differences in organization; and I can easily believe that the species that cannot cross a certain meridian or rise to a certain height above sea-level without dying are very dependent upon the influence of climate and quick to betray its effects in their forms and instincts. It is just, however, because man is absolutely free from such bondage that I refuse to be always comparing his position, in face of the forces of nature, with that of the animals.] Changes have certainly been brought about in the constitution of races, since the dawn of history, by such external influences; but they do not seem to have been important enough to be able to explain fully the many vital divergences that exist. This will become clear in a moment.
I will suppose that there are two tribes which still bear a resemblance to the primitive type, and happen to be living, the one in a mountainous country in the interior of a continent, the other on an island in the midst of the ocean. The atmosphere and the food conditions of each will be quite different. I will assume that the one has many ways of obtaining food, the other very few. Further, I will place the former in a cold climate, the second under a tropical sun. By this means the external contrast between them will be complete. The course of time will add its own weight to the action of the natural forces, and there is no doubt that the two groups will gradually accumulate some special characteristics which will distinguish them from each other. But even after many centuries no vital or organic change will have taken place in their constitution. This is proved by the fact that we find peoples of a very similar type, living on opposite sides of the world and under quite different conditions, of climate and everything else. Ethnologists are agreed on this point and some have even believed that the Hottentots are a Chinese colony — a hypothesis impossible on other grounds — on account of their likeness to the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire.* [Barrow is the author of this theory, which he bases on certain points of resemblance in the shape of the head and the yellowish colour of the skin in the natives of the Cape of Good Hope. A traveller, whose name I forget, has even brought additional evidence by observing that the Hottentots usually wear a head-dress like the conical hat of the Chinese.] In the same way, some have seen a great resemblance between the portraits we have of the ancient Etruscans and the Araucans of South America. In features and general shape the Cherokees seem almost identical with many of the Italian peoples, such as the Calabrians. The usual type of face among the inhabitants of Auvergne, especially the women, is far less like the ordinary European's than that of many Indian tribes of North America. Thus when we grant that nature can produce similar types in widely separated countries, under different conditions of life and climate, it becomes quite clear that the human races do not take their qualities from any of the external forces that are active at the present day.
I would not, however, deny that local conditions may favour the deepening of some particular skin-colour, the tendency to obesity, the development of the chest muscles, the lengthening of the arms or the lower limbs, the increase or decrease of physical strength. But, I repeat, these are not essential points; and to judge from the very slight difference made by the alteration of local conditions in the shape of the body, there is no reason to believe that they have ever had very much influence. This is an argument of considerable weight.
Although we do not know what cataclysmal changes may have been effected in the physical organization of the races before the dawn of history, we may at least observe that this period extends only to about half the age attributed to our species. If for three or four thousand years the darkness is impenetrable, we still have another period of three thousand years, of which we can go right back to the beginning in the case of certain nations. Everything tends to show that the races which were then known, and which have remained relatively pure since that time, have not greatly changed in their outward appearance, although some of them no longer live in the same places, and so are no longer affected by the same external causes. Take, for example, the Arabs of the stock of Ishmael. We still find them, just as they are represented in the Egyptian monuments, not only in the parched deserts of their own land, but in the fertile, and often damp, regions of Malabar and the Coromandel Coast, in the islands of the Indies, and on many points of the north coast of Africa, where they are, as a fact, more mixed than anywhere else. Traces of them are still found in some parts of Roussillon, Languedoc, and the Spanish coast, although almost two centuries have passed away since their invasion. If the mere influence of environment had the power, as is supposed, of setting up and taking away the limits between organic types, it would have not allowed these to persist so long. The change of place would have been followed by a corresponding change of form.
After the Arabs, I will mention the Jews, who are still more remarkable in this connexion, as they have settled in lands with very different climates from that of Palestine, and have given up their ancient mode of life. The Jewish type has, however, remained much the same; the modifications it has undergone are of no importance and have never been enough, in any country or latitude, to change the general character of the race. The warlike Rechabites of the Arabian desert, the peaceful Portuguese, French, German, and Polish Jews — they all look alike. I have had the opportunity of examining closely one of the last kind. His features and profile clearly betrayed his origin. His eyes especially were unforgettable. This denizen of the north, whose immediate ancestors had lived, for many generations, in the snow, seemed to have been just tanned by the rays of the Syrian sun. The Semitic face looks exactly the same, in its main characteristics, as it appears on the Egyptian paintings of three or four thousand years ago, and more; and we find it also, in an equally striking and recognizable form, under the most varied and disparate conditions of climate. The identity of descendant and ancestor does not stop at the features; it continues also in the shape of the limbs and the temperament. The German Jews are usually smaller and more slender in build than the men of European race among whom they have lived for centuries. Further, the marriageable age is much earlier among them than among their fellow-countrymen of another race.* [Muller, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, vol. ii, p. 639.]
This, by the way, is an assertion diametrically opposed to the opinion of Prichard, who in his zeal for proving the unity of the species, tries to show that the age of puberty, for the two sexes, is the same everywhere and in all races.* [Prichard, "Natural History of Man," 2nd edition, pp. 484 et sqq.] The reasons which he advances are drawn from the Old Testament in the case of the Jews, and, in the case of the Arabs, from the religious law of the Koran, by which the age of marriage is fixed, for girls, at fifteen, and even (in the opinion of Abu- Hanifah) at eighteen.
These two arguments seem very questionable. In the first place, the Biblical evidence is not admissible on this point, as it often includes facts that contradict the ordinary course of nature. Sarah, for example, was brought to bed of a child in extreme old age, when Abraham himself had reached a hundred years;* [Genesis xxi, 5.] to such an event ordinary reasoning cannot apply. Secondly, as to the views and ordinances of the Mohammedan law, I may say that the Koran did not intend merely to make sure of the physical fitness of the woman before authorizing the marriage. It wished her also to be far enough advanced in education and intelligence to be able to understand the serious duties of her new position. This is shown by the pains taken by the prophet to prescribe that the girl's religious instruction shall be continued to the time of her marriage. It is easy to see why, from this point of view, the day should have been put off as long as possible and why the law-giver thought it so important to develop the reasoning powers, instead of being as hasty in his ordinances as nature is in hers. This is not all. Against the serious evidence brought forward by Prichard, there are some conclusive arguments, though of a lighter nature, that decide the question in favour of my view.
The poets, in their stories of love, are concerned merely with showing their heroines in the flower of their beauty, without thinking of their moral development; and the Oriental poets have always made their girl-lovers younger than the age prescribed by the Koran. Zuleika and Leila are certainly not yet fourteen. In India, the difference is still more marked. Sakuntala would be a mere child in Europe. The best age of love for an Indian girl is from nine to twelve years. It is a very general opinion, long accepted and established among the Indian, Persian, and Arab races, that the spring of life, for a woman, flowers at an age that we should call a little precocious. Our own writers have for long followed the lead, in this matter, of their Roman models. These, like their Greek teachers, regarded fifteen as the best age. Since our literature has been influenced by Northern ideas,* [We must make an exception in the case of Shakespeare, who is painting a picture of Italy. Thus in Romeo and Juliet Capulet says: "My child is yet a stranger in the world; She hath not seen the change of fourteen years; Let two more summers wither in their pride; Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride." To which Paris answers: "Younger than she are happy mothers made."] we have seen in our novels nothing but girls of eighteen, or even older.
Returning now to more serious arguments, we find them equally abundant. In addition to what I have said about the German Jews, it may be mentioned that in many parts of Switzerland the sexual development of the people is so slow that, in the case of the men, it is not always complete at twenty. The Bohemians, or Zingaris, yield another set of results, which are easily verified. They show the same early development as the Hindus, who are akin to them; and under the most inclement skies, in Russia and in Moldavia, they still keep the expression and shape of the face and the physical proportions, as well as the ideas and customs, of the pariahs.* [According to Krapff, a Protestant missionary in East Africa, the Wanikas marry at twelve, boys and girls alike (Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, vol. iii, p. 317). In Paraguay the Jesuits introduced the custom, which still holds among their disciples, of marrying the boys at thirteen and the girls at ten. Widows of eleven and twelve are to be seen in this country (A. d'Orbigny, L'Homme americain, vol. i, p. 40). In South Brazil the women marry at ten or eleven. Menstruation both appears and ceases at an early age (Martius and Spix, Reise in Brasilien vol. i, p. 382). Such quotations might be infinitely extended; I will only cite one more. In the novel of Yo-kiao-Li the Chinese heroine is sixteen years old, and her father is in despair that at such an age she is not yet married!]
I do not, however, mean to oppose Prichard on every point. One of his conclusions I gratefully adopt, namely that "difference of climate occasions very little, if any, important diversity as to the periods of life and the physical changes to which the human constitution is subject."* [Prichard, p. 486.] This remark is very true, and I would not dream of contesting it. I merely add that it seems to contradict to some slight extent the principles otherwise upheld by the learned American physiologist and antiquary.
The reader will not fail to see that the question on which the argument here turns is that of the permanence of types. If we have shown that the human races are each, as it were, shut up in their own individuality, and can only issue from it by a mixture of blood, the unitarian theory will find itself very hard-pressed. It will have to recognize that, if the types are thus absolutely fixed, hereditary, and permanent, in spite of climate and lapse of time, mankind is no less completely and definitely split into separate parts, than it would be if specific differences were due to a real divergence of origin.
It now becomes an easy matter for us to maintain this important conclusion, which we have seen to be amply supported, in the case of the Arabs, by the evidence of Egyptian sculpture, and also by the observation of Jews and gipsies. At the same time there is no reason for rejecting the valuable help given by the paintings in the temples and underground chambers in the valley of the Nile, which equally show the permanence of the Negro type, with its woolly hair, prognathous head, and thick lips. The recent discovery of the bas-reliefs at Khorsabad confirm what was already known from the sculptured tombs of Persepolis, and themselves prove, with absolute certainty, that the Assyrians are physiologically identical with the peoples who occupy their territory at the present day.
If we had a similar body of evidence with regard to other races still living, the result would be the same. The fact of the permanence of types would merely be more fully demonstrated. It is enough however to have established it in all the cases where observation was possible. It is now for those who disagree to propose objections.
They have no means of doing so, and their line of defence shows them either contradicting themselves from the start, or making some assertion quite contrary to the obvious facts. For example, they say that the Jewish type has changed with the climate, whereas the facts show the opposite. They base their argument on the existence in Germany of many fair-haired Jews with blue eyes.* [It has been since discovered that this fairness, in certain Jews, is due to a mixture of Tartar blood; in the 9th century a tribe of Chasars went over to Judaism and intermarried with the German-Polish Jews (Kutschera, Die Chasaren). — Tr.] For this to have any value from the unitarian point of view, climate would have to be regarded as the sole, or at any rate the chief, cause of the phenomenon; whereas the unitarians themselves admit that the colour of the skin, eyes, and hair in no way depends either on geographical situation or on the influence of cold or heat.* [Edinburgh Review, "Ethnology or the Science of Races," October 1848, pp. 444-8: ''There is probably no evidence of original diversity of race which is so generally relied upon as that derived from the colour of the skin and the character of the hair . . . but it will not, we think, stand the test of a serious examination. . . . ] They rightly mention the presence of blue eyes and fair hair among the Cingalese;* [Ibid., p. 453: "The Cingalese are described by Dr. Davy as varying in colour from light brown to black. The prevalent hue of their hair and eyes is black, but hazel eyes and brown hair are not very uncommon; grey eyes and red hair are occasionally seen, though rarely, and sometimes the light blue or red eye and flaxen hair of the Albino."] they even notice a considerable variation from light brown to black. Again, they admit that the Samoyedes and Tungusians, although living on the borders of the Arctic Ocean, are very swarthy.* [Edinburgh Review, "The Samoyedes, Tungusians, and others living on the borders of the Icy Sea have a dirty brown or swarthy complexion."] Thus the climate counts for nothing so far as the colouring of the skin, hair, and eyes is concerned. We must regard them either as having no significance at all, or as vitally bound up with race. We know, for example, that red hair is not, and never has been, rare in the East; and so no one need be surprised to find it to-day in some German Jews. Such a fact has no influence, one way or the other, on the theory of the permanence of types.
The unitarians are no more fortunate when they call in history to help them. They give only two instances to prove their theory — the Turks and the Magyars. The Asiatic origin of the former is taken as self-evident, as well as their close relation to the Finnish stocks of the Ostiaks and the Laplanders. Hence they had in primitive times the yellow face, prominent cheek- bones, and short stature of the Mongols. Having settled this point, our unitarian turns to their descendants of to-day; and finding them of a European type, with long thick beards, eyes almond-shaped, but no longer slanting, he concludes triumphantly, from this utter transformation of the Turks, that there is no permanence in race.* [Ibid., p. 439.] "Some people," he says in effect, "have certainly supposed in them a mixture of Greek, Georgian, and Circassian blood. But this mixture has been only partial. Not all Turks have been rich enough to buy wives from the Caucasus; not all have had harems filled with white slaves. On the other hand, the hatred felt by the Greeks towards their conquerors, and religious antipathy in general, have been unfavourable to such alliances; though the two peoples live together, they are just as much separated in spirit at the present time as on the first day of the conquest."* [Ibid., p. 439 (summarized).]
These reasons are more specious than solid. We can only admit provisionally the Finnish origin of the Turkish race. Up to now, it has been supported only by a single argument, the affinity of language. I will show later how the argument from language, when taken alone, is peculiarly open to doubt and criticism. Assuming however that the ancestors of the Turkish people belonged to the yellow race, we can easily show that they had excellent reasons for keeping themselves apart from it.
From the time when the first Turanian hordes descended from the north-east to that when they made themselves masters of the city of Constantine, a period comprising many centuries, great changes passed over the world; and the Western Turks suffered many vicissitudes of fortune. They were in turn victors and vanquished, slaves and masters; and very diverse were the peoples among whom they settled. According to the annalists,* [Hammer, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reichs, vol. i, p. 2.] the Oghuzes, their ancestors, came down from the Altai Mountains, and, in the time of Abraham lived in the immense steppes of Upper Asia that extend from the Katai to Lake Aral, from Siberia to Tibet. This is the ancient and mysterious domain that was still inhabited by many Germanic peoples,* [Ritter, Erdkunde, Asien, vol. i, pp. 433, 1115, &c.; Tassen, Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. ii, p. 65; Benfey, Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopddie, Indien, p. 12. A. von Humboldt calls this fact one of the most important discoveries of our time (Asie centrale, vol. ii, p. 639). From the point of view of historical science this is absolutely true.] It is a curious fact that as soon as Eastern writers begin to speak of the peoples of Turkestan, they praise their beauty of face and stature.* [Nushirwan, who reigned in the first half of the sixth century A.D., married Sharuz, daughter of the Turkish Khan. She was the most beautiful woman of her time (Hanebcrg, Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. i, p. 187). The Shahnameh gives many facts of the same kind.] Hyperbolic expressions are the rule, in this connexion; and as these writers had the beautiful types of the ancient world before their eyes, as a standard, it is not very likely that their enthusiasm should have been aroused by the sight of creatures so incontrovertibly ugly and repulsive as the ordinary specimens of the Mongolian race. Thus in spite of the linguistic argument, which may itself be wrongly used,* [Just as the Scythians, a Mongolian race, had adopted an Aryan tongue, so there would be nothing surprising in the view that the Oghouzes were an Aryan race, although they spoke a Finnish dialect. This theory is curiously supported by a naive phrase of the traveller Rubruquis, who was sent by St. Louis to the ruler of the Mongols. "I was struck," says the good monk, "by the likeness borne by this prince to the late M. Jean de Beaumont, who was equally ruddy and fresh-looking." Alexander von Humboldt, interested, as he well might be, by such a remark, adds with no less good sense, "This point of physiognomy is especially worth noting if we remember that the family of Tchingiz was probably Turkish, and not Mongolian." He confirms his conclusion by adding that "the absence of Mongolian characteristics strikes us also in the portraits which we have of the descendants of Baber, the rulers of India" (Asie centrale, vol. i, p. 248 and note).] we might still make out a good case for our view. But we will concede the point, and admit that the Oghuzes of the Altai were really a Finnish people; and we will pass on to the Mohammedan period, when the Turkish tribes were established, under different names and varied circumstances, in Persia and Asia Minor.
The Osmanlis did not as yet exist, and their ancestors, the Seljukians, were already closely connected in blood with the races of Islam. The chiefs of this people, such as Gayaseddin- Keikosrev, in 1237, freely intermarried with Arab women. They did better still; for Aseddin, the mother of another line of Seljukian princes, was a Christian. In all countries the chiefs watch more jealously than the common people over the purity of their race; and when a chief showed himself so free from prejudice, it is at least permissible to assume that his subjects were not more scrupulous. As the continual raids of the Seljukians offered them every opportunity to seize slaves throughout the vast territory which they overran, there is no doubt that, from the thirteenth century, the ancient Oghuz stock, with which the Seljukians of Rum claimed a distant kinship, was permeated to a great extent with Semitic blood.
From this branch sprang Osman, the son of Ortoghrul and father of the Osmanlis. The families that collected round his tent were not very numerous. His army was no more than a robber-band; and if the early successors of this nomad Romulus were able to increase it, they did so merely by following the practice of the founder of Rome, and opening their tents to anyone who wished to enter.
It may be assumed that the fall of the Seljukian Empire helped to send recruits of their own race to the Osmanlis. It is clear that this race had undergone considerable change; besides, even these new resources were not enough, for from this time the Turks began to make systematic slave-raids, with the express object of increasing their own population. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Urkan, at the instance of Khalil Chendereli the Black, founded the Guard of Janissaries. At first these were only a thousand strong. But under Mohammed IV the new guard numbered 140,000; and as up to this time the Turks had been careful to fill up the ranks only with Christian children taken from Poland, Germany, and Italy, or from European Turkey itself, and then converted to Islam, there were in four centuries at least 5000 heads of families who infused European blood into the veins of the Turkish nation.
The racial admixture did not end here. The main object of the piracy practised on such a large scale throughout the Mediterranean was to fill up the harems. Further (a still more conclusive fact) there was no battle, whether lost or won, that did not increase the number of the Faithful. A considerable number of the males changed their religion, and counted henceforth as Turks. Again, the country surrounding the field of battle was overrun by the troops and yielded them all the women they could seize. The plunder was often so abundant that they had difficulty in disposing of it; the most beautiful girl was bartered for a jack-boot.* [Hammer, op. cit., vol. i, p. 448: "The battle against the Hungarians was hotly contested and the booty considerable. So many boys and girls were seized that the most beautiful female slave was exchanged for a jackboot, and Ashik-Pacha-Zadeh, the historian, who himself took part in the battle and the plunder, could not sell five boy-slaves at Skopi for more than 500 piastres."] When we consider this in connexion with the population of Asiatic and European Turkey, which has, as we know, never exceeded twelve millions, we see clearly that the arguments for or against the permanence of racial type find no support whatever in the history of such a mixed people as the Turks. This is so self-evident, that when we notice, as we often do, some characteristic features of the yellow race in an Osmanli, we cannot attribute this directly to his Finnish origin; it is simply the effect of Slav or Tartar blood, exhibiting, at second hand, the foreign elements it had itself absorbed.
Having finished my observations on the ethnology of the Ottomans, I pass to the Magyars.
The unitarian theory is backed by such arguments as the following: "The Magyars are of Finnish origin, and allied to the Laplanders, Samoyedes, and Eskimos. These are all people of low stature, with wide faces and prominent cheek-bones, yellowish or dirty brown in colour. The Magyars, however, are tall and well set up; their limbs are long, supple and vigorous, their features are of marked beauty, and resemble those of the white nations. The Finns have always been weak, unintelligent, and oppressed. The Magyars take a high place among the conquerors of the world. They have enslaved others, but have never been slaves themselves. Thus, since the Magyars are Finns, and are so different, physically and morally, from all the other branches of their primitive stock, they must have changed enormously."* ["Ethnology," &c, p. 439: "The Hungarian nobility ... is proved by historical and philological evidence to have been a branch of the great Northern Asiatic stock, closely allied in blood to the stupid and feeble Ostiaks and the untamable Laplanders."]
If such a change had really taken place, it would be so extraordinary as to defy all explanation, even by the unitarians, however great the modifications that may be assumed in these particular types; for the transformation-scene would have taken place between the end of the ninth century and the present day, that is, in about 800 years. Further, we know that in this period St. Stephen's fellow countrymen have not intermarried to any great extent with the nations among whom they live. Happily for common sense, there is no need for surprise, as the argument, though otherwise perfect, makes one vital mistake — the Hungarians are certainly not Finns.
In a well-written article, A. de Gerando* [Essai historique sur I'origine des Hongrois (Paris, 1844).] has exploded the theories of Schlotzer and his followers. By weighty arguments drawn from Greek and Arab historians and Hungarian annalists, by facts and dates that defy criticism, he has proved the kinship of the Transylvanian tribe of the Siculi with the Huns, and the identity in primitive times of the former with the last invaders of Pannonia. Thus the Magyars are Huns.
Here we shall no doubt be met by a further objection, namely that though this argument may point to a different origin for the Magyars, it connects them just as intimately as the other with the yellow race. This is an error. The name "Huns" may denote a nation, but it is also, historically speaking, a collective word. The mass of tribes to which it refers is not homogeneous. Among the crowd of peoples enrolled under the banner of Attila's ancestors, certain bands, known as the " White Huns," have always been distinguished. In these the Germanic element predominated. [The current opinions about the peoples of Central Asia will, it seems, have to be greatly modified. It can no longer be denied that the blood of the yellow races has been crossed more or less considerably by a white strain. This fact was not suspected before, but it throws a doubt on all the ancient notions on the subject, which must now be revised in the light of it. Alexander von Humboldt makes a very important observation with regard to the Kirghiz-Kasaks, who are mentioned by Menander of Byzantium and Constantine Porphyrogenetes. He rightly shows that when the former speaks of a Kirghiz ([x]) concubine given by the Turkish Shagan Dithubul to Zemarch, the envoy of the Emperor Justin II, in 569, he is referring to a girl of mixed blood. She corresponds exactly to the beautiful Turkish girls who are so praised by the Persians, and who were as little Mongolian in type as this Kirghiz (Asie centrale, vol. i, p. 237, &c.; vol. ii, pp. 130-31).]
Contact with the yellow races had certainly affected the purity of their blood. There is no mystery about this; the fact is betrayed at once by the rather angular and bony features of the Magyar. The language is very closely related to some Turkish dialects. Thus the Magyars are White Huns, though they have been wrongly made out to be a yellow race, a confusion caused by their intermarriages in the past (whether voluntary or otherwise) with Mongolians. They are really, as we have shown, cross-breeds with a Germanic basis. The roots and general vocabulary of their language are quite different from those of the Germanic family; but exactly the same was the case with the Scythians, a yellow race speaking an Aryan dialect,* [Schaffarik, Slavische Altertumer, vol. i, p. 279 et pass.] and with the Scandinavians of Neustria, who were, after some years of conquest, led to adopt the Celto-Latin dialect of their subjects. [Aug. Thierry, Histoire de la Conquete d'Angleterre, vol. i, p. 155.] Nothing warrants the belief that lapse of time, difference of climate, or change of customs should have turned a Laplander or an Ostiak, a Tungusian or a Permian, into a St. Stephen. I conclude, from this refutation of the only arguments brought forward by the unitarians, that the permanence of racial types is beyond dispute; it is so strong and indestructible that the most complete change of environment has no power to overthrow it, so long as no crossing takes place.
Whatever side, therefore, one may take in the controversy as to the unity or multiplicity of origin possessed by the human species, it is certain that the different families are to-day absolutely separate; for there is no external influence that could cause any resemblance between them or force them into a homogeneous mass.
The existing races constitute separate branches of one or many primitive stocks. These stocks have now vanished. They are not known in historical times at all, and we cannot form even the most general idea of their qualities. They differed from each other in the shape and proportion of the limbs, the structure of the skull, the internal conformation of the body, the nature of the capillary system, the colour of the skin, and the like; and they never succeeded in losing their characteristic features except under the powerful influence of the crossing of blood.
This permanence of racial qualities is quite sufficient to generate the radical unlikeness and inequality that exists between the different branches, to raise them to the dignity of natural laws, and to justify the same distinctions being drawn with regard to the physiological life of nations, as I shall show, later, to be applicable to their moral life.
Owing to my respect for a scientific authority which I cannot overthrow, and, still more, for a religious interpretation that I could not venture to attack, I must resign myself to leaving on one side the grave doubts that are always oppressing me as to the question of original unity; and I will now try to discover as far as I can, with the resources that are still left to me, the probable causes of these ultimate physiological differences.
As no one will venture to deny, there broods over this grave question a mysterious darkness, big with causes that are at the same time physical and supernatural. In the inmost recesses of the obscurity that shrouds the problem, reign the causes which have their ultimate home in the mind of God; the human spirit feels their presence without divining their nature, and shrinks back in awful reverence. It is probable that the earthly agents to whom we look for the key of the secret are themselves but instruments and petty springs in the great machine. The origins of all things, of all events and movements, are not infinitely small, as we are often pleased to say, but on the contrary so vast, so immeasurable by the poor foot-rule of man's intelligence, that while we may perhaps have some vague suspicion of their existence, we can never hope to lay hands on them or attain to any sure discovery of their nature. Just as in an iron chain that is meant to lift up a great weight it frequently happens that the link nearest the object is the smallest, so the proximate cause may often seem insignificant; and if we merely consider it in isolation, we tend to forget the long series that has gone before. This alone gives it meaning, but this, in all its strength and might, derives from something that human eye has never seen. We must not therefore, like the fool in the old adage, wonder at the power of the roseleaf to make the water overflow; we should rather think that the reason of the accident lay in the depths of the water that filled the vessel to overflowing. Let us yield all respect to the primal and generating causes, that dwell far off in heaven, and without which nothing would exist; conscious of the Divine power that moves them, they rightly claim a part of the veneration we pay to their Infinite Creator. But let us abstain from speaking of them here. It is not fitting for us to leave the human sphere, where alone we may hope to meet with certainty. All we can do is to seize the chain, if not by the last small link, at any rate by that part of it which we can see and touch, without trying to catch at what is beyond our reach — a task too difficult for mortal man. There is no irreverence in saying this; on the contrary, it expresses the sincere conviction of a weakness that is insurmountable.
Man is a new-comer in this world. Geology — proceeding merely by induction, but attacking its problems in a marvellously systematic way — asserts that man is absent from all the oldest strata of the earth's surface. There is no trace of him among the fossils. When our ancestors appeared for the first time in an already aged world, God, according to Scripture, told them that they would be its masters and have dominion over everything on earth. This promise was given not so much to them as to their descendants; for these first feeble creatures seem to have been provided with very few means, not merely of conquering the whole of nature, but even of resisting its weakest attacks.* [Lyell, "Principles of Geology," vol. i, p. 178.] The ethereal heavens had seen, in former epochs, beings far more imposing than man rise from the muddy earth and the deep waters. Most of these gigantic races had, no doubt, disappeared in the terrible revolutions in which the inorganic world had shown a power so immeasurably beyond that possessed by animate nature. A great number, however, of these monstrous creatures were still living. Every region was haunted by herds of elephants and rhinoceroses, and even the mastodon has left traces of its existence in American tradition.* [Link, Die Urwelt und das Altertum, vol. i, p. 84.]
These last remnants of the monsters of an earlier day were more than enough to impress the first members of our species with an uneasy feeling of their own inferiority, and a very modest view of their problematic royalty. It was not merely the animals from whom they had to wrest their disputed empire. These could in the last resort be fought, by craft if not by force, and in default of conquest could be avoided by flight. The case was quite different with Nature, that immense Nature that surrounded the primitive families on all sides, held them in a close grip, and made them feel in every nerve her awful power.* [Link, op. cit., vol. i, p. 91.] The cosmic causes of the ancient cataclysms, although feebler, were always at work. Partial upheavals still disturbed the relative positions of earth and ocean. Sometimes the level of the sea rose and swallowed up vast stretches of coast; sometimes a terrible volcanic eruption would vomit from the depths of the waters some mountainous mass, to become part of a continent. The world was still in travail, and Jehovah had not calmed it by "seeing that it was good."
This general lack of equilibrium necessarily reacted on atmospheric conditions. The strife of earth, fire, and water brought with it complete and rapid changes of heat, cold, dryness, and humidity. The exhalations from the ground, still shaken with earthquake, had an irresistible influence on living creatures. The causes that enveloped the globe with the breath of battle and suffering could not but increase the pressure brought to bear by nature on man. Differences of climate and environment acted on our first parents far more effectively than to-day. Cuvier, in his "Treatise on the revolutions of the globe," says that the inorganic forces of the present day would be quite incapable of causing convulsions and upheavals, or new arrangements of the earth's surface, such as those to which geology bears witness. The changes that were wrought in the past on her own body by the awful might of nature would be impossible to-day; she had a similar power over the human race, but has it no longer. Her omnipotence has been so lost, or at least so weakened and whittled away, that in a period of years covering roughly half the life of our species on the earth, she has brought about no change of any importance, much less one that can be compared to that by which the different races were for ever marked off from each other.* [Cuvier, op. cit. Compare also, on this point, the opinion of Alexander von Humboldt: ''In the epochs preceding the existence of the human race the action of the forces in the interior of the globe must, as the earth's crust increased in thickness, have modified the temperature of the air and made the whole earth habitable by the products which we now regard as exclusively tropical. Afterwards the spatial relation of our planet to the central body (the sun) began, by means of radiation and cooling down, to be almost the sole agent in determining the climate at different latitudes. It was also in these primitive times that the elastic fluids, or volcanic forces, inside the earth, more powerful than they are to-day, made their way through the oxidized and imperfectly solidified crust of our planet" (Asie centrale, vol. i, p. 47).]
Two points are certain: first that the main differences between the branches of our race were fixed in the earliest epoch of our terrestrial life; secondly, that in order to imagine a period when these physiological cleavages could have been brought about, we must go back to the time when the influence of natural causes was far more active than it is now, under the normal and healthy conditions. Such a time could be none other than that immediately after the creation, when the earth was still shaken by its recent catastrophes and without any defence against the fearful effects of their last death-throes.
Assuming the unitarian theory, we cannot give any later date for the separation of types.
No argument can be based on the accidental deviations from the normal which are sometimes found in certain individual instances, and which, if transmitted, would certainly give rise to important varieties. Without including such deformities as a hump-back, some curious facts have been collected which seem, at first sight, to be of value in explaining the diversity of races. To cite only one instance, Prichard* [Second edition, pp. 92-4. The man was born in 1727.] quotes Baker's account of a man whose whole body, with the exception of his face, was covered with a sort of dark shell, resembling a large collection of warts, very hard and callous, and insensible to pain; when cut, it did not bleed. At different periods this curious covering, after reaching a thickness of three-quarters of an inch, would become detached, and fall off; it was then replaced by another, similar in all respects. Four sons were born to him, all resembling their father. One survived; but Baker, who saw him in infancy, does not say whether he reached manhood. He merely infers that since the father has produced such offspring, "a race of people may be propagated by this man, having such rugged coats and coverings as himself; and if this should ever happen, and the accidental original be forgotten, it is not improbable they might be deemed a different species of mankind."
Such a conclusion is possible. Individuals, however, who are so different as these from the species in general, do not transmit their characteristics. Their posterity either returns to the regular path or is soon extinguished. All things that deviate from the natural and normal order of the world can only borrow life for a time; they are not fitted to keep it. Otherwise, a succession of strange accidents would, long before this, have set mankind on a road far removed from the physiological conditions which have obtained, without change, throughout the ages. We must conclude that impermanence is one of the essential and basic features of these anomalies. We could not include in such a category the woolly hair and black skin of the negro, or the yellow colour, wide face, and slanting eyes of the Chinaman. These are all permanent characteristics; they are in no way abnormal, and so cannot come from an accidental deviation.
We will now give a summary of the present chapter.
In face of the difficulties offered by the most liberal interpretation of the Biblical text, and the objection founded on the law regulating the generation of hybrids, it is impossible to pronounce categorically in favour of a multiplicity of origin for the human species.
We must therefore be content to assign a lower cause to those clear-cut varieties of which the main quality is undoubtedly their permanence, a permanence that can only be lost by a crossing of blood. We can identify this cause with the amount of climatic energy possessed by the earth at a time when the human race had just appeared on its surface. There is no doubt that the forces that inorganic nature could bring into play were far greater then than anything we have known since, and under their pressure racial modifications were accomplished which would now be impossible. Probably, too, the creatures exposed to these tremendous forces were more liable to be affected by them than existing types would be. Man, in his earliest stages, assumed many unstable forms; he did not perhaps belong, in any definite manner, to the white, red, or yellow variety. The deviations that transformed the primitive characteristics of the species into the types established to-day were probably much smaller than those that would now be required for the black race, for example, to become assimilated to the white, or the yellow to the black. On this hypothesis, we should have to regard Adamite man as equally different from all the existing human groups; these would have radiated all around him, the distance between him and any group being double that between one group and another. How much of the primitive type would the peoples of the different races have subsequently retained? Merely the most general characteristics of our species, the vague resemblances of shape common to the most distant groups, and the possibility of expressing their wants by articulate sounds — but nothing more. The remaining features peculiar to primitive man would have been completely lost, by the black as well as the non-black races; and although we are all originally descended from him, we should have owed to outside influences everything that gave us our distinctive and special character. Henceforth the human races, the product of cosmic forces as well as of the primitive Adamic stock, would be very slightly, if at all, related to each other. The power of giving birth to fertile hybrids would certainly be a perpetual proof of original connexion; but it would be the only one. As soon as the primal differences of environment had given each group its isolated character, as a possession for ever — its shape, features, and colour — from that moment the link of primal unity would have been suddenly snapped; the unity, so far as influence on racial development went, would be actually sterile. The strict and unassailable permanence of form and feature to which the earliest historical documents bear witness would be the charter and sign-manual of the eternal separation of races.