or rather of ages, acquiring a visible or oyster-like form, with little gills, instead of lungs, and, like the oyster, produced spontaneously, without distinction into sexes; that, as reproduction is always favourable to improvement, the aquatic or oyster mannikin, by being progressively accustomed to seek its food on the nascent shores or edges of the primæval ocean, must have grown, after a revolution of countless generations, first into an amphibious, and then into a terrestrial animal; and, in like manner, from being without sex, first also into an androgynous form, and thence into distinct male and female.* It is not necessary to notice this dream of a poetizing philosopher, which had also been dreamed of long before his own day, any farther than to remark that it is in every respect inferior to the opinion of two of the most celebrated schools of ancient Greece, the Epicurean and the Stoic; who, though they disagreed on almost every other point, concurred in their dogma concerning the origin of man; and believed him to have sprung, equally with plants and animals of every kind, from the tender soil of the new-formed earth, at that time infinitely more powerful and prolific; produced in myriads of little wombs that rose, like mole-hills, over the surface of the ground, and were afterward transformed, for his nourishment, into myriads of glandular and milky bulbs, so as to form a marvellous substitute for the human breast. In the correct and elegant description of Lucretius,— Terra cibum pueris, vestem vapor, herba cubile Earth fed the nursling, the warm ether clothed, And frivolous as such a theory may appear in the present day, it was the only one which was current among the Grecian or Roman philosophers, except that which supposed mankind to have been propagated by eternal generation, and of course the universe, like himself, to be eternal and self-existent: compared with which, an origin from the dust of the earth, even after the manner of vegetables, is incomparably less monstrous and absurd. Let us now pass on to the hypothesis of those modern philosophers who would associate the tribes of man with the tribes of the monkey, and originate both from one common stock, in the same manner as the ox and buffalo are said to be derived from the bison, and the different varieties of sheep from the argali. There are a few wonderful histories afloat of wild men and wild women found in the woods of Germany and France; some of which are said to have been dumb, others to have had the voice of sheep or of oxen, and others again to have walked on all-fours. And from these few floating tales, not amounting, in modern times, to more than nine or ten, Linnæus thought proper to introduce the orang-otang into the human family, and to regard such instances of wild men as the connecting species between this animal and mankind in a state of civilized society. Whence Lord Monboddo has amused us with legends of men found in every variation of barbarism; in some instances even ungregarious or solitary; in others, uniting, indeed, into small hordes, but so scanty even in natural or inarticulate language, as to be obliged to assist their own meaning by signs and gestures; and, consequently, to be incapable of conversing in the dark; of a third sort who have in some degree improved upon their natural language, but have still so much of the savage beast belonging to them, as to employ their teeth and nails, which last are not less than an inch long, as weapons of defence; and of a fourth sort, found in an island of the Indian seas, with the full possession of speech, but with tails like those of cats or monkeys; a set of dreadful cannibals, which at one time killed and devoured every Dutchman they could lay their hands upon. It is truly wonderful that a scholar of Lord Monboddo's accomplishments * See Temple of Nature, Cant. i. p. 26. 29, ii. p. 54, iv. 158, and the additional notes on Spontaneous Vital ity and Reproduction. De Rer. Nat. v. 803. could have allowed himself to be for one moment imposed upon by a mass of trash so absurd and extravagant as not to be worth the trouble of confuting. Such romances are certainly in existence; but they are nothing more than the fabled news of a few low and illiterate mariners, whose names were never sufficient to give them the slightest degree of authority, even when they were first uttered; and which, for the most part, dropped successively into an obscure and ignominous grave on the moment of their birth, and would have silently mouldered away into their elemental nothingness, had not this very singular writer chosen to rake up their decomposing atoms, in order to support an hypothesis which sufficiently proves its own weakness by the scouted and extravagant evidence to which it is compelled to appeal. Of the wild men and wild women of Linnæus, some appear to have been ideots, escaped from their keepers; a few exaggerated accounts of stray children from some wretched hovel of Lithuanian peasants; and one of them, a young negress, who, during a shipwreck on the French coast, had swam on shore, and at once saved herself from death, and, what is worse than death, from slavery. She is said to have been found in the woods of Champagne, about the middle of the last century, and was at first exhibited under the name of la fille sauvage and la belle sauvage; and had the honour, soon afterward, of being painted as a sign-post to one of our most celebrated inns in this metropolis, which is still known by the name of the Bell Savage. This young negress was instructed in the French language by the family into whose hospitable hands she fell, and was afterward, from some unaccountable whim, denominated Mademoiselle LE BLANC.* In order, however, to settle this question completely, let me mention a few of the anatomical points in which the orang-otang differs from the human form, and which cannot possibly be the effect of a mere variety, but must necessarily flow from an original and inherent distinction. More might be added, but what I shall offer will be sufficient; and if I do not touch upon a comparison of the interior faculties, it is merely because I will neither insult your understandings nor degrade my own, by bringing them into any kind of contact. Both the orang and pongo, which of all the monkey tribes make the nearest approach to the structure of the human skeleton, have three vertebræ fewer than man. They have a peculiar membranous pouch connected with the larynx or organ of the voice, which belongs to no division of man whatever, white or black. The larynx itself is, in consequence of this, so peculiarly constructed as to render it less capable even of inarticulate sounds than that of almost every other kind of quadruped: and, lastly, they have no proper feet; for what are so called are, in reality, as directly hands as the terminal organs of the arms: the great toe in man, and that which chiefly enables him to walk in an erect position, being a perfect thumb in the orang-otang. Whence this animal is naturally formed for climbing: and its natural position in walking, and the position which it always assumes excepting when under discipline, is that of all-fours; the body being supported on four hands, instead of on four feet as in quadrupeds. And it is owing to this wide and essential difference, as, indeed, we had occasion to observe in our last study, that M. Cuvier, and other zoologists of the present day, have thought it expedient to invent a new name by which the monkey and maucauco tribes may be distinguished from all the rest; and, instead of QUADRUPEDS, have called them QUADRUMANA, or QUADRUMANUALS; by which they are at the same time equally distinguished from every tribe of the human race, which are uniformly, and alone, BIMANUAL. But throwing the monkey kind out of the question, as in no respect related to the race of man, it must at least be admitted, contend the second class of philosophers before us, that the wide differences in form, and colour, and degree of intellect, which the several divisions of mankind exhibit, as you * See Monboddo on the Origin of Language, &c. vol. i. p. 193, 480. have now arranged them, must necessarily have originated from different sources; and that even the Mosaic account itself will afford countenance to such an hypothesis. This opinion was first stated, in modern times, by the celebrated Isaac Peyrere librarian to the Prince of Condé; who, about the middle of last century, contended, in a book which was not long afterward condemned to the flames, though for other errors in conjunction with the present, that the narration of Moses speaks expressly of the creation of two distinct species of man;—an elder species which occupied a part of the sixth day's creation, and is related in the first chapter of Genesis; and a junior, confined to Adam and Eve, the immediate progenitors of the Hebrews to whom this account was addressed; and which is not referred to till the seventh verse of the second chapter, and even then without any notice of the exact period in which they were formed. After which transaction, observes this writer and those who think with him, the historian confines himself entirely to the annals of his own nation, or of those which were occasionally connected with it. Neither is it easy, they adjoin, to conceive upon any other explanation, how Cain in so early a period of the world as is usually laid down, could have been possessed of the implements of husbandry which belonged to him; or what is meant by the fear he expressed, upon leaving his father's family, after the murder of Abel, that every one who found him would slay him; or, again, his going forth into another country, marrying a wife there, and building a city soon after the birth of his eldest son. Now, a cautious perusal of the Mosaic narrative will, I think, incontestably prove that the two accounts of the creation of man refer to one and the same fact, to which the historian merely returns, in the seventh verse of the second chapter, for the purpose of giving it a more detailed consideration; for it is expressly asserted in the fifth, or preceding verse but one, as the immediate reason for the creation of Adam and Eve, that at that "time there was not a man to till the ground;" while, as to the existence of artificers competent to the formation of the first rude instruments employed in husbandry, and a few patches of mankind scattered over the regions adjoining that in which Cain resided, at the period of his fratricide, it should be recol lected that this first fall of man by the hand of man, did not take place till a hundred and twenty-nine years after the creation of Adam: for it was in his one hundred and thirtieth year that Seth was given to him in the place of Abel: an interval of time amply sufficient, especially if we take into consideration the peculiar fecundity of both animals and vegetables in their pri meval state, for a multiplication of the race of man, to an extent of many thousand souls. On such a view of the subject, therefore, it should seem that the only fair and explicit interpretation that can be given to the Mosaic history is, that the whole human race has proceeded from one single pair, or in the words of another part of the Sacred Writings, that God "hath made of ONE BLOOD all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth."* The book of nature is in this as in every other respect in union with that of Revelation: it tells us that one single pair must have been adequate to all the purposes on which this class of philosophers have grounded their objections: and it should be farther observed to them, that thus to multiply causes without necessity is not more inconsistent with the operations of nature than with the principles of genuine philosophy. But the question still returns: whence, then, proceed those astonishing diversities among the different nations of mankind, upon which the arrangement now offered is founded? The answer is, that they are the effect of a combination of causes; some of which are obvious, others of which must be conjectured, and a few of which are beyond the reach of human comprehension:-but all of which are common to other animals, as well as to man; for extraordinary as these *Acts, xvii. 26. not fro the the diversities may appear, they are equally to be met with in the varieties of several other kinds of animals that can be proved to have been produced from a single species, and, in one or two instances, from a single pair. The chief causes we are acquainted with are the four following: climate, food, manner of life, and hereditary diseases. I. The influence which CLIMATE principally produces on the animal frame is on the colour of the skin and on the extent of the stature. All the deepest colours we are acquainted with are those of hot climates; and all the lightest those of cold ones. In our own country we perceive daily, that an exposure to the rays of the sun turns the skin from its natural whiteness to a deep brown or tan; and that a seclusion from the sun keeps it fair and unfreckled. In like manner the tree-frog (rana arborea) while living in the shade is of a light yellow, but of a dark green when he is obliged to shift from the shade into the sunshine. So the nereis lacustris, though whitish under the darkness of a projecting bank, is red when exposed to the sun's rays. And that the larves of most insects that burrow in the cavities of the earth, of plants, or of animals, are white, from the same cause, is clear, since being confined under glasses that admit the influence of solar light, they exchange their whiteness for a brownish hue. The same remark will apply to plants as well as to animals; and hence nothing more is necessary to bleach or whiten them, than to exclude them from the light of day. Hence the birds, beasts, flowers, and even fishes of the equatorial regions are uniformly brighter or deeper tinctured in their spots, their feathers, their petals, and their scales, than we find them in any other part of the world. And hence, one reason at least for the deep jet which, for the most part, prevails among mankind under the equator; the dark-brown and copper colours found under the tropics; and the olive, shifting through every intermediate shade to the fair and sanguine complexion, as we proceed from the tropic of Cancer northwards. Hence, too, the reason why the Asiatic and African women, confined to the walls of their seraglios, are as white as Europeans; why Moorish children, of both sexes, are, at first, equally fair, and why the fairness continues among the girls, but is soon lost among the boys. As we approach the poles, on the contrary, we find every thing progressively whiten; bears, foxes, hares, falcons, crows, and blackbirds, all assume the same common livery; while many of them change their colour with the change of the season itself. For the same reason, as also because they have a thinner mucous web, the Abyssinians are less deep in colour than the negro race; for though their geographical climate is nearly the same, their physical climate differs essentially: the country stands much higher, and its temperature is far lower. The immediate matter of colour, as I had occasion to observe more fully in a preceding lecture, is the mucous pigment which forms the middle layer of the general integument of the skin; and upon this the sun, in hot climates, appears to act in a twofold manner; first, by the direct affinity of its colorific rays with the oxygen of the animal surface, in consequence of which the oxygen is detached and flies off; and the carbon and hydrogen being set at liberty, form a more or less perfect charcoal according to the nature of their union; and next, by the indirect influence which its calorific rays, like many other stimulants, produce upon the liver, by exciting it to a secretion of more abundant bile, and of a deeper hue. I have formerly remarked that this second or colouring layer of the general integument of the skin, differs (as indeed all the layers of the skin do) in its thickness, not only in different kinds of animals, but very frequently in different species, varieties, and even individuals. Thus in our own country we find it more abundant in some persons than in others; and wherever it is most abundant, we find the complexion also of a darker and coarser and greasier appearance, upon a common exposure to the solar light and heat: and we find also, that the hair is almost uniformly influenced by such increase of colour, and is proportionally coarser and darker. It is of some consequence to attend to this observation; for it may serve to explain a physiological fact that has hitherto been supposed of difficult elucidation. A certain degree of heat, though less than that of the tropics, appears favourable to increase of stature; and I have already observed, that the tallest tribes we are acquainted with are situated at the back of Cape Horn, and the Cape of Good Hope. On the contrary, the most diminutive we are acquainted with are those that inhabit the coldest regions or the highest mountains in the world: such are the Laplanders and Nova Zemblians in Europe, the Samoieds, Ostiacs, and Tungooses in Asia, and the Greenlanders and Esquimaux in America. Such, too, are the Kimos of Madagascar, if the account of these pigmy people may be depended upon, whose native region is stated to be the central and highest tracts of the island, forming, according to Commerson, an elevation of not less than sixteen or eighteen hundred fathoms above the level of the sea. A multitude of distinct tribes have of late years been discovered in the interior of Africa, in the midst of the black tribes, exhibiting nothing more than a red or copper hue, with lank black hair. And, in like manner, around the banks of the lower Orinoco, in Mexico, where the climate is much hotter, there are many clans of a much lighter hue than those around the banks of the Rio Negro, where it is much cooler; and M. Humboldt has hence ventured to assert that we have here a full proof that climate produces no effect upon the colour of the skin. Such an assertion, however, is far too hasty; for he should first have shown that the thickness of the mucous web or colouring material is equally abundant in all these instances. For if it be more abundant (as it probably is) in the tribes that are swarthiest, we have reason to expect that a swarthier colour will be found where there is an equal or even a less exposure to solar light and heat; and we well know that the hair will vary in proportion.* II. The effects of DIFFERENT KINDS OF FOOD upon the animal system are as extensive and as wonderful as those of different climates. The fineness and coarseness of the wool or hair, the firmness and flavour of the flesh, and in some degree the colour of the skin, and extent of the stature, are all influenced by the nature of the diet. Oils and spirits produce a peculiar excitement of the liver; and like the calorific rays of the sun, usually become the means of throwing an overcharge of bile into the circulation. Hence the sallow and olive hue of many who unduly addict themselves to vinous potation, and who at the same time make use of but little exercise. And hence also the dark and dingy colour of the pigmy people inhabiting high northern latitudes, to whom we have just adverted, and whose usual diet consists of fish and other oils, often rancid and offensive. Though it must be admitted that this colour is in most instances aided by the clouds of smoke in which they sit constantly involved in their wretched cabins, and the filth and grease with which they often besmear their skins. And hence, also, one cause of their diminutive stature; the food they feed on being unassimilating and innutritive. Swine and all other animals fed on madder-root, or that of gallium verum, or yellow-ladies-bed-straw, have the bones themselves tinged of a deep red, or yellow and M. Huber of Lausanne, who has of late years made so many valuable discoveries in the natural habits of the honey-bee, has proved himself able by a difference in the food alone, as indeed Debraw had done long before him,t to convert what is commonly, but improperly, called a neuter into a queen bee. III. It would be superfluous to dwell on the changes of body and perceptive powers produced in the animal system by a DIFFERENCE IN THE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS. We have the most striking proofs of this effect in all the domestic animals by which we are surrounded. Compare the wild horse with the disciplined; the bison with the ox, which last is usually regarded as See Essal Politique sur la Nouvelle Espagne, par Alexandre de Humboldt, &c. p. 84, 85, 4to. Parin, 1 8, 1809. † See Phil Trans. for 1777, p. 15. A i th its enl RDC 1 |