Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/93

Rh soil without order or rule. To investigate such languages may be an object of great curiosity where full means are possessed, but it may be doubted, whether the utmost study of them could lead to any profitable results, while the attempt to classify them into groups, as we find various writers doing on the strength of some few words picked up among them, cannot but be the occasion of numerous errors. Under these considerations, though "the more closely approaching to one another we find these dialects or languages, the more confidently we may pronounce on the affinity of the people, still any disagreement whatever must not be taken absolutely as a difference of origin. If however we have reason to dispute the use of the word race as leading some persons to consider mankind of different origins, still more reason have we to dispute the propriety of the term Varieties of the Human Species as leading to the same deductions. Classifications of this kind based not upon their language, their institutions, or manners, but solely on their color, or gradations of color, appear to me highly incorrect and unphilosophical. Every day's observation shows us that children of the same parents are constantly born of very distinctly marked complexions, and all history tells us the same fact. The earliest record of our race tells us that of two brothers, who were also twin brothers, one was a hairy man and the other a smooth man, one was born red and the other as the prototype of his race was probably a dark man. Such children born light or fair, if placed under peculiar influences of climate, would feel the influences of climate and leave family characteristics to their children more or less strongly marked according to circumstances. Officers who have served on the coast of Africa, I know, and I believe Europeans generally, there not only become what is commonly termed tanned, but find their hair become also crisped, so as to give them the impression of its becoming of an altered nature which in the course of years or generations might even render it woolly. Experience thus shows that the color of the skin and even the character of the countenance, becomes modified by climate. In the course of upwards of 13 years residence at the Hanava, where I had many hundreds of Africans under my superintendence, I soon became able easily to recognize youths who had been born in Africa from those of the same class who had been born in Cuba. If they had been brought very young from Africa, as they very frequently were, they grew up equally intelligent and cleanly, the one as the other, but still distinctly different from each other in the character of the