CHAPTER XXII.
FORMATION OF HUMAN RACES UNDER THE SOLE INFLUENCE
OF CONDITIONS OF LIFE AND HEREDITY.
I. The first men who peopled the centre of human appearance must at first have differed from each other only in individual features. At their beginning and during an indefinite lapse of time, mankind could only have been homogeneous, as is every animal and vegetable species which is restricted to an area of small extent.
At the present time, we find mankind composed of numerous groups, which have peculiar characters, and constitute so many distinct races. How have these races originated? and how have they grown and multiplied?
To give a definite reply to these questions, by going back from recent effects to first causes, is still impossible, and perhaps will always be so. Nevertheless, science may even now approach the general aspects of the problem. We are well acquainted with the circumstances under which varieties originate and races are formed among plants and animals: we have established in man the occurrence of a number of phenomena, which are in this respect identical, or very similar to those exhibited by the two inferior kingdoms. We are therefore clearly authorised to apply inferences drawn from them to ourselves, connecting particular with general facts. This study is instructive in many respects. Unfortunately, we cannot fully enter upon it here; we can only select some facts in the history of animals to justify our conclusions.
II. The problem of the formation of human races presents two very distinct cases. Man at first was subject to the sole action of natural modifying agents. Under this influence pure races were formed. When these races came in contact, they were crossed; this resulted in the formation of mixed races. Without being antagonistic to the natural forces, crossing modifies them by its peculiar phenomena, and sometimes masks their manifestations. The two cases, therefore, require separate examination. We will begin with the first.
III. Every organic species considered as a whole appears to be subjected to the action of two forces, one of which tends to maintain and the other to modify its characters. To what cause can this double action be referred? This is a question put by the greatest thinkers and the most eminent physiologists, from Aristotle and Hippocrates to Burdach and J. Müller.
It is not the resemblances existing between the members of the same species, or between the members of one family, which perplex philosophers: all agree in referring them to heredity. The problem lies rather in the differences. Not only in the considerable differences which are established between races; but more especially in the shades constituting the individual traits which distinguish father from son, or brother from brother. This is in reality the fundamental difficulty, and many hypotheses have been proposed for its solution. Prosper Lucas, after having discussed them separately, regarded them all as insufficient, and believed that, side by side with heredity, which maintains types, we ought to admit a special force, innateness (l’innéité) which diversifies them.
We can, however, account for the double tendency exhibited by living beings, without having recourse to a new force. For this purpose it is sufficient to push the analysis of phenomena a little further than is customary, and to obtain a clear idea of the part played by the conditions of life (milieu) and heredity. As a general rule an action is attributed to the first, which everywhere and at all times is a modifying one, and to the second a purely conservative action. Now it may be easily shown that this is not the case; and that each of these causes acts in an inverse manner according to circumstances.
IV. By virtue of the laws of heredity, the father and mother tend equally to transmit to their offspring their own character. However similar they may be supposed to be, there are always some differences between them; and the nature of the new being is necessarily a compromise between two different tendencies. The son cannot, therefore, always resemble his father exactly. In him the characters common to both parents will easily be exaggerated; the opposite characters will be neutralised; and the different characters will produce a resultant, as distinct from the two components as green is from yellow and blue. Thus even by virtue of its own tendencies, and in consequence of the enforced co-operation of the sexes, direct and immediate heredity becomes, in some respects, a cause of variation.
Mediate and indirect heredity, justly compared by Burdach to geneagenetic phenomena, as well as atavism, which suddenly reproduces with great exactness the characters of an ancestor, sometimes after hundreds of generations, have certainly considerable influence in the variation of individual traits, and in the differences which distinguish parents from their children.
Their action, added to that of direct heredity, is sufficient to explain the appearance of certain varieties, without appealing to innateness.
V. But the hereditary force, although it is manifested from one generation to another, or through several generations, is always influenced by the conditions of life (milieu), and this has evidently greater force.
This term ought to be taken in a much more general sense than is usually the case. Buffon himself only took into account climate, varying quantities of food, and the hardships of servitude, when he was treating of domestic animals. I understand by the conditions of life something much more complex. They comprehend the sum of all the conditions under whose sway a plant, an animal, or man, is formed and grows as germ, embryo, youth, and adult. To make a selection from these conditions, to admit some and take them into consideration, to reject and exclude the rest, is evidently an entirely arbitrary procedure. The consideration of only a certain period of life, the neglect of the whole intra-ovarian or intra-uterine period, deserves the same reproach. From this point of view, the existence of a being cannot be severed, any more than the conditions of life under whose rule this existence is accomplished.
A number of cases do away with all doubt as to the action of the conditions of life upon the germ, or upon the embryo, however much it may appear to be protected by the envelopes of the ovum, or by the tissues of the mother. The two Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire have clearly proved that monstrosity dates from the earliest stages of the formation of the being, and indicates in certain cases the external causes which have produced it. The experiments of M. Dareste have confirmed and enlarged in a singular manner these first conclusions, while giving them greater precision. By mixing madder with the food of a female mammal, Flourens produced a red colour in the bones of the fœtus. By placing the eggs of a salmon-trout in waters which only nourished white-trout, Coste noticed the eggs become gradually paler, and produce trout which had lost the characteristic colour of their race. In order to increase the height of our excellent small horses of the “camargue” race, it is sufficient to give the mare during the period of gestation a more plentiful diet than that to which she is accustomed in her half-wild state.
Thus it is established in the clearest manner and by exact experiments that the conditions of life, when acting upon the embryo during the intra-uterine or intra-ovarian part of its existence, are capable of producing either the gravest teratological disorders, or simple and slight deviations. We are, therefore, clearly justified in attributing to the same cause modifications which are placed between these extremes according to their importance. To invoke innateness, in order to explain their appearance, is obviously superfluous. We shall connect, therefore, with actions of this kind the appearance of the first spineless Acacia of which we have spoken before, of the first Ancon sheep in Massachusetts in 1791, that of the first Mauchamp sheep in France in 1828, etc.
The Ancon and Mauchamp races are only propagated by human industry. But these sudden deviations from a given type can also extend and multiply their numbers by themselves. It is well-known that South American oxen are descended from a horned Spanish race. Now, in 1770, a hornless ox was produced in Paraguay. In several years, according to d’Azara, this exceptional form had, as it were, invaded several provinces. Nevertheless, the race is far from being in favour, because the absence of horns renders it less liable to be caught by the lasso, so that its destruction was attempted. It was, therefore, evidently propagated spontaneously.
Whoever has the smallest acquaintance with embryogenesis will have no difficulty in understanding that conditions of life act especially upon organisms in respect to their formation and evolution. However, their influence upon an animal, even when full-grown, is sometimes quite as marked. Our sheep, when transferred to America, generally become acclimatised without undergoing great changes. Their fleece, particularly, is retained. But in the plains of the Meta it is only retained on condition of the sheep being regularly shorn. If they are left to themselves, the wool becomes of a felty nature, is detached in flakes, and is replaced by a short, stiff, and shining hair. Under the influence of this burning climate, the same individual becomes in turn a woolly and a hairy animal. Now, innateness, as Prosper Lucas conceives it, cannot be appealed to in the case of changes undergone by a full-grown animal, whilst the action of conditions of life is here incontestable.
VI. We have just pointed out how heredity and conditions of life can give rise to a variety. Now, the individual which has commenced to deviate from its original type becomes in its turn a parent; it tends to transmit to its offspring the exceptional characters which distinguish it. The same facts are repeated in its offspring; and, at each generation, the actions of the conditions of life are added to each other. Thus every time heredity transmits the sum of these actions to the following generation. The faintest modification increased from father to son sometimes leads to most marked changes. Our European oxen, in the hot plains of Mariquita and Neyba gradually lost their hair, at first became pelones, and would soon have formed an entirely naked race, if the calongos had not been regularly killed. Again, pigs which have become wild in the Paramos have acquired a kind of wool under the action of a continuous, but not excessive cold. The Guinea dog and the Esquimaux dog present an analogous contrast between races of the same species.
In the preceding examples, and in many others which must be omitted, the actions in question modify organisms in order to place them in harmony with the conditions of life. Now it is intelligible that when the maximum of possible effect has once been attained, they can only fix the result obtained more fully, but can never determine a change in the opposite direction. The heat, which has by degrees deprived calongo cattle of their hair, will never restore it again; and the cold which has made our pigs woolly, will never deprive them of wool. Here, then, we find conditions of life acting as an agent of preservation and stability.
VII. In the preceding passage allusion has been made to natural forces left to themselves. It is to them that the formation is due of the wild races of all the species whose geographical area is very extended, such as the fox, jackal, lion, etc.
These races are sometimes so different that they were regarded as distinct species, as long as the intervening geographical and zoological terms were unknown. Frederick Cuvier himself made this mistake in the case of the jackals of India and those of the Senegal. Wild races have, however, never been so numerous or so distinct from each other as domesticated races.
Are we to infer from this that man exercises around himself and of himself a kind of magnetic action, as some authors seem to admit? Certainly not. In reality, he only acts upon an animal by setting in action, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, the two agents which, hitherto, we have met with everywhere, conditions of life and heredity. By the single fact of domestication, by the confinement which is almost always the result of it, he changes entirely the natural conditions of existence. By leading in his train the animals which he has enslaved, he diversifies still more the influences which act upon them. Prompt to seize every means of rendering them most useful, he profits by the smallest modifications which show the least advantage, pushes them to their utmost limits and produces the extreme races, of which our exhibitions of animal races give such curious examples.
The chief means which man uses for the attainment of these results, which at times seem to border on the marvellous, is selection. Ever since he has possessed domestic animals he has marked out among them individuals which are better adapted than the rest to his intentions. By some kind of instinct, or unconsciously, as Darwin says, he has chosen them to breed from. By rejecting the types which he considers inferior, and only employing the higher types wherewith to propagate the species, he has directed the action of heredity in a definite direction, and has readily created races. Now, man has acted in this manner since the times spoken of in Genesis and by Chou-King, that is, for thousands of years. Is it then surprising that he should have multiplied around him hereditary forms which are more or less distinct from the primitive types?
Progressive selection would doubtless lead to numerous and varied results. Would it allow of the creation of races whose characters almost reach hemitery? The answer to this question is at least doubtful. But we have not to ask it. When by one of the actions of the conditions of life, whose origin remains obscure, an almost teratological animal form is produced, it soon disappears by the mixture of blood from different sources, if unions are left to chance. This is the reason why analogous facts are not observed in feral races. But if this form appears in a domestic animal, if it answers to any want or caprice, selection intervenes, preserves it, and multiplies it. This explains the origin of the Ancon sheep, which were all descended from a single ram of which we have spoken above; also the means by which M. Graux de Mauchamp has raised his race of sheep with silky fleeces from a single ram. These two examples show how all those peculiar races have been obtained, which in some of their characters seem to clash with the very type from which they were derived. In the canine species the beagle corresponds to the Ancon sheep; the niata cattle, which have appeared in South America since its conquest, correspond to the bull-dog, etc.
VIII. Races, when once formed under man’s influence, are fixed by the same causes which produced them. Their characters, which at first were entirely artificial, become more and more fixed, so much so, that even a very considerable change in the conditions of existence, never effaces them entirely. The acquired nature is, so to speak, welded to the original nature of the being.
This is a fact not generally recognised by naturalists and anthropologists who have touched upon these questions. For instance, it has been admitted as proved that domestic races, when they have returned to the feral state, reassume all the original characters of the species. This is a mistake. The fact is, that both with animals and plants, escaped races lose a certain number of characters, and frequently the most apparent ones, which they owe to domestication; they reassume others which they had lost during their period of servitude, but the former are more frequently only diminished and masked by the latter. If fruit-trees escaped from our orchards, if our horses, dogs, cattle, and pigs, when they have become wild, had really reassumed the original type of the species, they ought to present in every area which they inhabit the marked uniformity characteristic of animals who were never subject to man. This is not the case. They ought in particular to preserve no trace of their acquired characters. Now, the latter are partly persistent. Vans Mons has found apple-trees and pear-trees of Belgium, in a wild state, in the forest of the Ardennes. The prickles had reappeared, the fruit had become small and bitter again, but the principal cultivated varieties were still to be recognised. I have established an analogous fact with regard to cling-stone and free-stone peach-trees in a valley of the Cévennes. Similarly Martin de Moussy has recognised in the troops of dogs which have become wild in America, all the chief races from which they had been derived, although they reassumed the general characters of the tan-coloured type.
IX. From the number of observations which have been collected among plants and animals, and of which I can only notice a small number, it is easy to understand the appearance and multiplication of human races, and to account for certain general facts, some of which are closely connected with our history. Let us state at starting that with man, as with animals, varieties have appeared at times which may be classed among hemitery. Individuals, exhibiting from their birth exceptional characters, are none the less healthy, and sometimes have very remarkable power of transmission. Edward Lambert, born in 1717 of perfectly healthy parents, had all his life a kind of carapace more than an inch thick, and irregularly fissured, which gave him the name of the porcupine man. All his children, to the number of six, and his two grandchildren, inherited this strange modification of the skin, although his wife and his daughter-in-law did not show the least trace of it. In the Colburn family, four generations were marked with polydactylism which was derived from the grandmother of the great calculator. At the fourth generation, four children out of eight still had supernumerary fingers, though at each generation normal blood was mixed with the teratological blood.
Evidently, if the descendants of Lambert and Colburn had been treated like those of the first Ancon or Mauchamp sheep, two human races would have been obtained, one characterised by a cutaneous carapace, and the other by the possession of six fingers. But here selection was wanting, and the exceptional blood, from being diluted at each fresh marriage, did not fail to be rapidly exhausted.
X. Man does not subject himself to the selection, which he applies with so much success to animals and plants. In his species, therefore, the extreme variations which are obtained elsewhere are not produced. It is thus easily explained why the limits of variation are not so extensive with man as with domesticated or cultivated races. But if, for some motive or other, he were to apply the process of selection to himself, we should not have to wait long for the result. By marrying the tallest women to the giants of their guard, Frederick William and Frederick II. had created at Potsdam a real race distinguished for its tall stature. In Alsace a Duke de Deux-Ponts, who imitated the Prussian sovereigns, obtained the same result.
There is another cause which contributes powerfully to restrict the limits of variation in man, namely, the power which his intelligence gives him of partly escaping from the effects of the conditions of life. He is always struggling, as much as he is able, against the external influences capable of disturbing the equilibrium which constitutes his well-being. In the tropics, he uses contrivances for avoiding the heat; in the polar circle, he perfects his means of heating; if he emigrates, he carries with him, as far as he can, his manners and customs, and struggles with redoubled care against the new conditions of life. There is nothing strange in finding him successful in neutralising to a certain extent the modifying influences of the external world.
XI. Nevertheless, the conditions of life do not surrender their rights; although diminished, their action is none the less real. This is a fact which can be affirmed by what occurs in our great western colonies. Each great European race is there represented by derived sub-races which vary according to the locality. The islands in the Gulf of Mexico, North and South America, and Australia itself, which has been so recently colonised, have at this time their own peculiar races, some of which are remarkably characterised.
Since I am unable to treat in detail all these facts of transmutation, I will only notice some of the facts which have been established in the United States. We know that the English race was only definitely settled there at the time of the Puritan emigration, about 1620, and from the arrival of Penn in 1681. Two centuries and a half, twelve generations at the most, separate us from this epoch, and nevertheless, the Anglo-American, the Yankee, no longer resembles his ancestors. The fact is so striking that the eminent zoologist, Andrew Murray, when endeavouring to account for the formation of animal races, finds he cannot do better than appeal to the condition of mankind in the United States.
The subject, moreover, is not wanting in precise details, which are vouched for by a number of travellers, by naturalists, and doctors. At the second generation the English Creole in North America, presents, in his features, an alteration which approximates him to the native races. Subsequently the skin dries and loses its rosy colour, the glandular system is reduced to a minimum, the hair darkens and becomes glossy, the neck becomes slender, and the size of the head diminishes. In the face, the temporal fossæ are pronounced, the cheek bones become prominent, the orbital cavities become hollow, and the lower jaw massive. The bones of the extremities are elongated, while their cavity is diminished, so much so, that in France and England gloves are specially made for the United States with exceptionally long fingers. Lastly, in the woman, the pelvis, in its proportions, approaches to that of the man.
Are these changes signs of a degeneration already accomplished, and of an approaching extinction, as Knox asserts? I think a reply to this assertion is hardly necessary. We are sufficiently acquainted with American men and women to know that, although modified, the physical type is not on that account lowered in the scale of races; and the social grandeur of the United States, the marvels they have accomplished, the energy with which they pass through the rudest crises, prove that from every point of view, the Yankee race has retained its rank. It is simply a new race, formed by the American conditions of life, but which remains worthy of its elder sisters in Europe, and will perhaps some day surpass them.
The Negro transported into the same countries has also undergone remarkable changes. His colour has paled, his features have improved, and his physiognomy is altered. “In the space of 150 years,” says M. Elisée Reclus, “they have passed a good fourth of the distance which separates them from the whites, as far as external appearance goes.” Lyell’s opinion is almost the same. Moreover, when visiting two Negro churches, at Savannah, he remarked that the odour so characteristic of the race was scarcely appreciable. A long medical experience at New Orleans has shown Dr. Visinié that the blood of the Negro Creole has lost the excess of plasticity which it possessed in Africa. With MM. Reiset, de Lisboa, etc., with even Nott and Gliddon, let us add that, while the physical type has undergone modification, the intelligence has improved, and we shall have to recognise that in the United States a sub-Negro race has been formed, derived from the imported race.
XII. Thus the European White and the African Negro, when under the influence of new conditions of life, have both undergone modification. Moreover both, according to M. Reclus, whose statements are confirmed by those of M. l’Abbé Brasseur de Bonbourg, approximate to the indigenous races. Both of these authors seem to admit that at the end of a given time, whatever be their origin, all the descendants of Whites or of Negroes who have immigrated to America will become Red-skins.
When two such intelligent observers arrive at an identical and certainly quite unexpected conclusion on such a question, the facts must be very patent. Yet they have forced their meaning, from not having taken sufficient account of the nature of the problem. That the Negro and the White should replace some of their features and characters by some of the features and characters belonging to the indigenous races, is quite natural. When subject to the action of the conditions of life which have formed the local races, they could not help being influenced by it to a certain extent. But they will never on that account be confused with the local races nor with each other, any more than the White transported to Africa would ever become a true Negro, or the European descendants of a Negro would ever become true Whites.
This impossibility of one race being transformed into another is often brought forward as an objection against Monogenism. It is nevertheless the natural consequence of the phenomena, of which I have endeavoured to give a short account, and is easily explained. Every race is a resultant whose components are, partly the species itself, partly the sum of the modifying agents which have produced the deviation from the type. We cannot separate those two elements, and races which have run wild show us to what extent the fusion can go. Every race which is fixed, when brought under the conditions of life which have formed another, will doubtless approximate to the latter; but it will partly retain its former impress, as the fruit-trees of Van Mons and the wild dogs of Martin de Moussy have done.
Such is what would take place even among primary races directly detached from the primitive type, and which have only been subject to the action of one fixed condition of life. But with the Negro and the White, the question is much more complex. These two extreme types represent the last product of two series of long-continued actions, whose diversity and multiplicity are indicated by the geographical stations themselves. Europe and tropical Africa have given them, if the expression may be used, the last touches; but their outline was sketched out long before they reached their present habitat. By their transposition, we only submit each of them to a part of the influences which have formed the other, and consequently a complete exchange of characters could never take place.
XIII. Without denying absolutely the influence of the conditions of life upon man, most polygenists refuse to admit that they have the power of producing new races. To support their statements, they appeal to the persistence of certain types for a considerable lapse of time, and insist most strongly upon certain facts derived from Egypt. On this latter point I readily agree with them. It is quite true that pictures and Egyptian sculptures point to the existence in the valley of the Nile of a type, or rather types, which are remarkably uniform; and whoever has visited these countries has certainly been struck, as I was, with the great resemblance of the peoples of the present to those of the past.
But what reasons are there why the inhabitants of the valley of the Nile should change? What cause, except intercrossing, could determine any modification in their physical characters? In this region, which is exceptional in so many respects, nothing has changed since historic times, neither the earth, the sky, nor the river; habits, customs, and daily life have remained as they were in the time of the Pharaohs; the Egyptian even uses implements in our days, which are exactly like those which were used fifty or sixty centuries ago by his ancestors.
In Egypt, all the conditions of existence, and, consequently, the actions of the conditions of life, are the same in our days as they were in those distant times, the history of which is preserved by the monuments. Far from tending to modify a race which is already fixed, they have only helped to fix it more and more. In the order of ideas which I support, a change in the Egyptian type would be inconceivable.
The persistence of a type, far from being an objection to the manner in which I understand the conditions of life to act, viz.: the formation and maintenance of races, is a confirmation of it.
XIV. In conclusion; like all animal and vegetable species, the human species can vary within certain limits; like plants and animals, man has his varieties and races, which have appeared and been formed by the action of the same causes.
In the human kingdom, as in the two other organic kingdoms, the first causes of variation are, conditions of life and heredity.
In phenomena of this kind, conditions of life act as the supreme ruler. If they vary, they become modifying agents, if they remain constant, agents of stabilisation.
In both cases their result is to harmonise organisms with the conditions of their existence.
Heredity, which is essentially a preserving agent, becomes an agent of variation, when it transmits and accumulates the modifying actions of the conditions of life.
XV. It is now easy to understand, in the general sense, the formation of human races.
Man at first doubtless peopled his centre of appearance and the countries immediately adjoining. He then commenced the immense and varied dispersion which dates from tertiary times and continues to the present day. He has passed through two geological epochs, and is now in his third. He has seen the mammoth and rhinoceros flourishing in Siberia in the midst of a rich fauna; he has at least seen them driven by the cold into the midst of Europe; and he has assisted in their extinction. Later on, he has retaken possession of the barren-lands himself; he has pushed his colonies as far as the neighbourhood of the pole, perhaps to the very pole itself, while at the same time he has invaded the forests and deserts of the tropics, reached the extremity of two great continents, and peopled all the archipelagoes.
For many thousands of years, man has therefore been subject to the action of all the external conditions of life with which we are acquainted, to that of the conditions of life of which we can at the utmost only form an idea. The various kinds of life to which he has been subjected, and the different degrees of civilisation at which he stopped or to which he has reached, have all diversified still more his conditions of existence. Was it possible that he should retain everywhere and for all time his original characters?
Experience and observation lead to an entirely opposite conclusion. When we see the Anglo-Saxon of our days, although protected by all the resources of an advanced civilisation, subjected to the American conditions of life, and changed into a Yankee, we must admit that at each of his great stages, when man is submitted to new conditions of existence, he has had to harmonise himself with them, and in so doing undergo modification. Each of these principal stations has necessarily witnessed the formation of a corresponding race. The original characters, thus successively affected, have become more and more altered, by reason of the length of the journey, and the difference of conditions. When they have reached the end of their journey the grandchildren of the first emigrants would certainly only retain very few of the characters of their ancestors.
The original human type has probably presented, for an indefinite time, its original characters in the tribes which remained fixed to the centre of appearance for our species. When the glacial epoch began, which, according to all appearance, made the earliest country of man uninhabitable, these tribes were forced to emigrate in their turn. Since that time the earth has no longer had autochthones, but has only been peopled by colonists. At the same time the modifying action of the conditions of life was felt by these last comers, who themselves were also transformed.
From this moment, the original type of man has been lost; the human species was only composed of races, all of which differed more or less from the first model.