Page:An essay on the origin and relative status of the white and colored races of mankind.djvu/23

 Piedmont, the Hogs are all black; in Bavaria, they are ail reddish brown; and in Normandy, they are all white; and that, corresponding with these varieties, the native inhabitants of Guinea, Madagascar, New Holland, New Guinea, &c., are black; many of the American Tribes arc reddish brown; and the Europeans are white. He then claims that all the varieties of the Hog came from one common ancestor—the wild Boar of those great Forests of Poland and Germany. But Mr. Blumenbach seems not to be aware that, by a fixed law of Nature, the color of wild animals is as unchangeable, through all generations, as the skin of the Ethiopian, or the spots of the Leopard; or that crosses between the wild and domestic Hog, like that between the Horse and the Ass and other wild and domestic animals, would probably cease after the first generation; and, moreover, that a resemblance to the primitive ancestor will show itself, occasionally, even in remote generations of domestic animals, liable to changes of color; but, according to Professor B's theory, the Hogs in each of those different countries, named by him, are uniformly of one color, and those in each country vary in color from those of each other country, and all of them, from the color of the wild Boar, claimed by him as their putative ancestor, which is a blackish or chestnut brown mixed with grey. In fact the wild Boar bears about the same relation to the domestic Hog, that the wild cat, which never changes its color, bears to the domestic cat of various colors. And if it be true that a different variety of the domestie Hog exists in each of those countries, and that in each of them, they are uniform in color, and none of them ever have projeny resembling their alleged putative ancestor (the wild Boar,) the inference and parallel is conclusive that, like the varieties of the human race, also peculiar to the respective countries which