Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/405

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 39 1

the result is different, because the national type does not degenerate when it is transported from the original to another country." A pure Jew never becomes a German or Russian, any more than a European becomes a negro.

Why, then, would the descendants of Adam, by whatever means they came to possess a particular type of race, be transformed into negroes, Papuans, Caribs, Malays, or Mongolians ? . . . . On the contrary, the explanation is simple if we admit that at the origin, in the several centers of creation, the individuals of the same species have been subjected, from the moment of their first appearance, to different reactions from outside, which have produced their varieties of color, stature, structure, features, extremities, and hair. According to the opposite opinion, in that which concerns the color, for instance, it would be necessary that all of the tints be derived from one fundamental tone. But then, why are the Australians and Papuans black, while the inhabitants of the islands of Reunion and the Friendly Islands very near the equator have remained a yellow-brown ? Why in America have all of the natives from north to south a red-brown color, while upon the eastern hemisphere white, yellow, brown, and black populations live quite near each other? Monogenism proceeds, at bottom from the inveterate prejudice of the Mosaic account of creation which has inculcated the legend of the unity of

origin What miracles, what strange decrees of chance, would not

have been necessary in order that a single couple might have, in the space of four thousand years, a progeny of a billion souls, which setting out from a single point, should have scattered themselves (by what means ?) upon the distant islands, upon the divers points of the great American continent so remote from each other ! Why should they not have remained together in the fertile plains where they first saw the light ? Why should they have preferred to betake themselves to the icy regions of the poles ? What was the cause of the development of such different languages, whose fundamental elements are partly heterogeneous ? How could one nation, having spoken first the language of its ancestors, come to adopt later a language entirely different?

The doctrines of variation, of heredity, and of natural selec- tion respond perfectly to these objections. The natural laws which explain the formation of the human varieties explain also the formation of new varieties, generally less distinct, which result from their mixture. But, on the other hand, it is necessary to acknowledge that neither the variability of the human species, nor heredity, nor selection proves historically the unity of origin of this species. So we have seen in these latter times the two contradictory terms of the problem, presenting themselves anew