Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/221

Rh formation, therefore wise miners do not look there for coal. The higher mammals are not found earlier than the Cenozoic, though their precursors are in the Jurassic. Man in the savage stage may be examined in the same spirit as the Jurassic stage is studied to trace what may afterward appear in the barbarian and Cenozoic, and is developed in the present epoch; but to search for the complete ideas of civilization in the period of barbarism would be as judicious as to dig for manuscripts among the workshops of flint arrow-heads.

The beliefs and practices of both the Israelites and the Indians were substantially the same as those of other bodies of people in the same stage of culture. They were neither of them a "peculiar" people.

There is, racially, no peculiar people in the sense intended. Mankind is homogeneous in nature, though its divisions at any one time are found in differing and advancing grades of culture. Such advancement has been from causes known to be still in continuous operation. What is called blood in a racial sense may be likened unto the water of the earth: as the water comes from the clouds it is chemically the same, and it is subjected, wherever it is, to the same laws. The early course of a rill may be turned by a pebble, and from the elevations and depressions met it may become a lake, or a river, or a stagnant marsh. From the character of soil encountered it may be clear or muddy, alkaline, chalybeate, or sulphurous. In one sense, which belongs to modern and not to ancient history, the Jews are a peculiar people, from the fact that for many centuries, until lately, they proclaimed themselves to be such, and observed religiously the doctrine about the Goim, and therefore did not intermarry with other peoples; but that should not be a reason for their boasting. Persecution made them pariahs and other peoples would not intermarry with them. During recent centuries the so-styled purity of their race has been kept up by isolation, but the assumption of great purity in the stock at the Christian era is not tenable. Now that their prejudices and those of the Goim against them are dissolving, it is probable that what has been improperly called the Jewish race will disappear by absorption as the Indians are now disappearing. To renew the simile, both Israelite and Indian will be lost in the homogeneous ocean which all mankind seems destined to swell.

It will be noticed that this presentation of views practically ignores the scholastic divisions of mankind into distinct races. The result of my own studies on the subject is a conviction that all attempts at the classification of races have failed. The best statement of the condition of scientific opinion regarding such classification may be taken from the address of Prof. W. H. Flower to the Section of Anthropology of the British Association for