Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/100

88 I venture to make these observations here primarily; 1st as leading me directly to the arguments which I have to adduce in support of my theories; and 2dly, because the learned Baron, in another part of the same work, and again in his last publication, "Cosmos," seems to countenance the ideas of some others, who have held that there were originally various distinct creations of beings of the human race, contrary to our faith that "God hath made of one blood all the nations upon earth." In the same chapter he says "Perhaps this race of copper-coloured men, comprehended under the general name of American Indians, is a mixture of Asiatic tribes, and the aborigines of this vast continent;" as if the two races were essentially distinct from each other, and as if the copper-coloured men, comprehended under the general name of American Indians, with all their mixtures, could not all of them have been only different migrations of Asiatic tribes, earlier or later arrived on the new continent.

In his last work, "Cosmos," Baron Von Humboldt expressly acknowledges the unity of the human species, but he seems at the same time to qualify this admission, by quoting approvingly a passage in the works of John Müller thus, "whether the existing races of men are descended from one or from several primitive men is a question not determined by experience."

Supposing that the translations from which these quotations are taken have been correctly rendered, it is not clear what these writers require for experience on such matters, or for philosophy itself; but whatever may be their views on these points, I proceed at once to the position I assume, that all the experience we possess, and all the conclusions we can in reasoning deduce from it, only tend to prove the correctness of the account given us in the Mosaic history, taken merely as history.

From this history we learn that the world, after the flood, was peopled from one stock, diverging into three families, evidently typifying the three varieties into which we see mankind divided, of which families some one or more of the branches might naturally be expected to carry out their distinguishing characteristics more decidedly than the others, according to circumstances, and yet, at the same time, only form connecting links in a graduated chain which united them in one universal relationship. As the different branches of each family diverged proportionately from each other, they might thus be expected to extend further their peculiar