Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/407

Rh fruits of the earth, before even a stone implement or the simplest form of canoe had been invented. They may, it is said, have begun their career in some fertile island in the tropics, where the warmth of the air was such, that no clothing was needed, and where there were no wild beasts to endanger their safety. But as soon as their numbers increased, they would be forced to migrate into regions less secure and blest with a less genial climate. Contests would soon arise for the possession of the most fertile lands, where game or pasture abounded, and their energies and inventive powers would be called forth, so that, at length, they would make progress in the arts.

But as ethnologists have failed, as yet, to trace back the history of any one race to the area where it originated, some zoologists of eminence have declared their belief, that the different races, whether they be three, five, twenty, or a much greater number, (for on this point there is an endless diversity of opinion, ) have all been primordial creations, having from the first been stamped with the characteristic features, mental and bodily, by which they are now distinguished, except where intermarriage has given rise to mixed or hybrid races. Were we to admit, say they, a unity of origin of such strongly marked varieties as the Negro and European, differing as they do in colour and bodily constitution, each fitted for distinct climates, and exhibiting some marked peculiarities in their osteological, and even, in some details of cranial and cerebral conformation, as well as in their average intellectual endowments (see above, p. 91),—if, in spite of the fact that all these attributes have been faithfully handed down unaltered for hundreds of generations, we are to believe that, in the course of time, they have all diverged from one common stock, how shall we resist the