Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/180

168 distinct branches of a single great race. By that criterion all Europeans would be mongrels. That kind of crossing has been going on among us since the dawn of the present geological period. We may begin to trace it through prehistoric times; and from the birth of history, even in the legendary form, it appears preparing the way for the actual condition of things. This fact alone unequivocally condemns all the theories which ascribe a degrading influence to intermixture considered by itself.

I refer at present only to mixtures of the white with the negro and other colored races. M. d'Omalius d'Halloy, a Belgian scholar distinguished for his critical spirit, in the last edition of his "Anthropology," fixes the population of the globe at twelve hundred millions, and the number of mongrels from crossings of this kind at eighteen millions. Thus the latter already constitute one sixty-sixth of the whole human race.

The proportion becomes more considerable when we look at some of the states of South America, where the aggregation of circumstances has favored a mixture of races. Statistics already several years old show in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, the La Plata, and Brazil, a total of 16,040,100 inhabitants, of whom 3,333,000 are mongrels. The latter, then, form about one fifth of the population. This proportion, high as it is, is really too small, for, since the censuses from which the numbers were borrowed were taken, the mixture of races has increased; again, many persons of mixed blood have been counted as whites. In these countries any one who rises to an honorable position in society can call himself a white, and no one will refuse him the privilege. I know of a family in the best society of one of the Central American states, in which the negro and Indian blood are notably mixed. All of its members pretend to be pure whites and pass for such, and a person who should express any doubt on the subject would be very badly received.

The inhabitants of the province of São Paulo in Brazil are nearly all the mixed issue of marriages contracted by the Portuguese and by whites from the Azores with the native tribes, the Carijos and the Guayanazos.

These facts are significant. They become more so when we recollect how short a time has been necessary to produce such results. In South and Central America, and Mexico, the crossing has been going on on an extensive scale only since the conquest of Mexico and Peru, between 1519 and 1533. Less than three centuries and a half separate us from that epoch—and what are three centuries in the history of mankind? It is easy to believe that in three centuries more the mixture will be complete in that part of the New World.

Are the United States and Canada the theatre of ethnogenic phenomena analogous to those which we have just proved to exist in the countries south of them? The contrary is generally asserted. We