Paul Broca

“ The difference of origin by no means implicates the subordination of races. It, on the contrary, implicates the idea that each race of men has originated in a determined region, as it were, as the crown of the fauna of that region; and if it were permitted to guess at the intention of nature, we might be led to suppose that she has assigned a distinct inheritance to each race, because, despite of all that has been said of the cosmopolitism of man, the inviolability of the domain of certain races is determined by their climate. ”

“ Among the various characters which distinguish the numerous varieties of the genus homo, some are more or less important, and more or less evident. To distinguish two races, a single character, however slight, is sufficient, provided it be hereditary and sufficiently fixed. If, for instance, two peoples differed merely from each other by the colour of the hair and the beard, though they may resemble each other in every other respect, by the simple fact that the one has black, whilst the other has fair hair, it may be asserted that they are not of the same race. ”

“ We must, however, take care not to imitate the paradoxical reasoning of our adversaries, and because some crossings of certain races are eugenesic, to conclude, à priori, that all the other intermixtures are equally so. The study of hybridity in birds and quadrupeds has taught us that we can never know with certainty, before making the experiment, what will be the result of crossing. Neither must we forget that the ethnological facts which have served us as examples apply to the intermixture of races distinct, no doubt, but nearly related in many respects. ”

“ It is even doubtful whether they are very prolific with the Whites, for no one has mentioned the existence of Quadroon Mulattoes, which might be as easily recognised as the Quadroons of the Antilles. However small the number of hybrid women of the first degree may be, these women ought to have produced with the Whites, if they had been very prolific, a progeny which ought to have become numerous in the population of a colony founded above seventy years; for there can be no doubt that there, as everywhere, the woman of colour selects by preference the alliance of men of a superior race. ”

“ When we see the prosperity and the power of the new continent grow with such unexampled rapidity, we can certainly put no faith in such a prediction. Still there must have been a certain number of fundamental facts, which led even monogenists to deny the viability of all crossed races. They must have sought in vain among the nations of the earth for a race manifestly hybrid, with well-defined characters, intermediate between two known races, perpetuating itself without the concurrence of the parent races. ”

“ At that time the scientific question became a question of sentiment, and whoever wished for the abolition of slavery, thought himself bound to admit that Negroes were Caucasians blackened and frizzled by the sun. Now that France and England, the two most civilised nations, have definitively emancipated their slaves, science may claim its rights without caring for the sophisms of slaveholders. ”

“ If, on the contrary, the two races, though numerically unequal, are in sufficient proportion that neither can absorb the other, both persist indefinitely beside each other upon the same soil. The hybrid race which they engender, seems also to persist indefinitely; but only in appearance, for they constantly intermarry with the pure races, while the latter marry between themselves. The mixed race gains thus, in every generation, a contingent equal to what it loses, those which represent it at present are not the descendants of those who represented the mixed race five or six generations back. ”

“ The system would then become what it was before it came in contact with science, namely, a belief more or less respectable, founded upon a sentiment or a dogma. But if the second question were also negatived, and it could be demonstrated that all human crossings are not eugenesic, then not merely the syllogism, but the whole doctrine of the monogenists would crumble to pieces. The doctrine would then not merely be extra-scientific, but anti-scientific; it being positive that two groups of animals, so different as to be incapable of fusion by generation, do not belong to the same species. ”

“ The causes which determine the increase or the decay of a population are so multifarious, and for the most part so foreign to ethnological influences, that we cannot without committing grave errors, estimate the degree of fecundity of different races, in comparing for each of them, the number of births and deaths. It appears, nevertheless, very probable that all the races are not equally prolific, and the mind easily perceives that there must be between them notable differences. ”

“ The Anthropological Society of London have done well in publishing a translation of Dr. Waitz’s Anthropologie der Naturvölker, of which this volume is the first instalment. Dr. Waitz’s work is by far the most complete that exists on the subject of which it treats. It is the fullest collection of facts, interwoven with, and made to bear upon, all the theories (and their name is legion) which have been advanced in explanation of the endless diversities and resemblances that exist among mankind. ”

“ If all men are descendants of one couple,—if the inequality of races has been the result of a curse more or less merited,—or again, if the one have degraded themselves, and have allowed the torch of their primitive intelligence to become extinct, whilst the other have carefully guarded the precious gift of the Creator,—in other words, if there be cursed and blessed races,—races which have obeyed the voice of nature and races which have disobeyed it,—then the Rev. John Bachmann is right to say that slavery is a Divine right ”

“ When a monogenist is called upon to demonstrate that all human intermixtures are eugenesic, the first example which he ordinarily cites is that of the Mulattoes in America, the issue of the union of European colonists and African negresses. This example, which has for a long time been considered as decisive, might not be without a reply; for there exist races differing much more from us than the races of the western coast of Africa; but the question here is, whether it be quite true that all American Mulattoes are eugenesic. ”

“ Why have all Caucasian races been united by them in one family, and called by them the white or the Caucasian race? It has been already stated because the races with a skin more or less white possess between themselves a greater affinity than with any of the other races. ”

“ SECTION II. OF EUGENESIC HYBRIDITY IN MANKIND.
If the opinion I wish to combat were not supported by authors of If, perhaps, be superfluous to demonstrate that there exists in the human species eugenesic hybrids. Most of the readers of these pages must reconcile themselves to this qualification, for assuredly men of a pure race are very rare in the country they inhabit. Nothing is, in fact, more clear than that many modern nations, to commence with the French, have been formed by the intermixture of two or more races. ”

“ Let us observe at the outset, how far the phenomena of eugenesic or non-eugenesic hybridity may affect the solution of the great question pending between the Monogenists and the Polygenists.
What in animals in general, characterises the eugenesic hybridity, is the unlimited fecundity of mongrels of the first degree between themselves. It is by no means necessary that the parent species should be as prolific in their crossings as in their direct unions, nor that the mongrels should be as productive as their parents, as large, as strong, and as long-lived, etc. ”

“ This contradiction has given a handle to the monogenists; for if climate and mode of life may cause a German to become a Celt, there is no reason why, under certain influences, a Celt might not become a Berber, a Berber a Foulah, a Foulah a Negro, and a Negro an Australian.
I easily comprehend how careful we ought to be to employ in Anthropology the term species. It can scarcely be used with certainty until science has clearly circumscribed the limits of each species of men. ”

“ Yet this very chief found it, according to Cunningham,71 quite natural that, according to the Australian custom, the weakest of two new-born twins should be killed.
This custom has been cited to show that the Australian women attach no importance to the lives of their children, and that, consequently, they would offer no resistance to the massacre of the new-born Mulattoes. A race of beings, where the females do not love their young, would scarcely be a human race. The custom of preserving only one twin, and to sacrifice the other on the day of its birth, seems improbable and inexplicable ”

“ In studying the phenomena of hybridity in quadrupeds and birds, we have already stated that homœogenesis, without being always proportionate to the degree of the proximity of species, decreases ordinarily in comparison with more removed animals, and that probability induces us to expect similar phenomena in the intermixture of human beings. But what have been the bases of the monogenists and of the pentagenists in forming the five ethnological groups, which constitute the five fundamental races? ”

“ The public mind is so little acquainted with the real facts relating to the hybridity of the Races of Man, that its investigation, “non ex vulgi opinione, sed ex sano judicio,” is necessary to the efficient progress of our science. Such an appeal, however, necessitates that the whole subject should be again reviewed, and to attain this object the perusal of a work on similar principles to that of Dr. Broca becomes the primary requisite for future researches. ”

“ After having demonstrated that the physical, intellectual, and moral characters establish between the races of men profound differences, which are indelible, and that all influences to which they have been attributed are absurd and imaginary, inasmuch as natural causes would never have produced such a deviation from the primitive form, Mr. Sagot supposes that the division in perfectly distinct races, and their methodical dispersion and repartition upon the surface of the earth, was a miraculous intervention of Providence. ”

“ Is there in our seaports a prostitute sufficiently ugly and old to frighten the sailor? Is it not known that the Hottentots, whose ugliness is proverbial, have intermixed with the Europeans of South Africa? ”

“ It is not merely in the region of the mop-headed Papuans that the other three races are to be met with. The Malays, an invading people par excellence, have, like the English, established themselves on all the coasts accessible to their vessels, and if the mop-headed race occupies only a very confined district, and is perfectly unknown elsewhere where the same elements are present, we are permitted to conclude that it is not the result of an intermixture. ”

“ In America, the intermixture between Whites, Negroes, and Mulattoes passes differently. The Mulattoes are slaves like the Negroes. A large number of Mulatresses become the concubines of the White: and the Mulattoes are mostly obliged to confine themselves to Negro women. There are, then, relatively few unions between Mulattoes of the same blood. The abolition of slavery neither could, nor will for a long time, sensibly modify this state of things. The prejudice against colour will not soon become effaced ”

“ They are disposed to admit that the Mosaic narration does not apply to the whole human race, but merely to the Adamites, from which sprung God’s people; that there may have been other human beings with whom the sacred writer had no concern; that it is nowhere said that the sons of Adam contracted incestuous alliances with their own sisters; that Cain, banished after the murder of his brother, had a mark set upon him that no one might kill him; that, besides the sons of God, there was a race of the sons of man; that the origin of the sons of men is not specified ”

“ Though the climate does not altogether depend on latitude, it may be readily believed that the Negroes become sooner acclimated upon the shores of the Gulf of Mexico than in the more northern regions. But it is known that men transplanted into climates differing much from that in which their race thrives may, by this simple fact, greatly lose their fecundity. It is not always so, but considering that it does happen, we have a right to ask whether the difference pointed out by Dr. Nott between the Mulattoes of South Carolina, and those of the region of the Gulf may not be owing to this cause. ”

“ But when a zoologist, in studying two races of animals, the specific determination of which is still contested, endeavours to establish that these two races are merely varieties of the same species, and when in order to weaken the differential anatomical characters pointed out by his adversaries, he invokes the physiological analogy exhibited by intermixture, we have a right to expect more than a partial demonstration. ”

“ The Hottentot race, which has long been considered to occupy the lowest degree, is evidently superior to them. The Hottentots, though refractory to education, have, at least, shown some degree of improvability, while the Australians seem absolutely incorrigible savages. The English have made the most persevering attempts to instruct them, but without any success. As they could not succeed with the adult population, they tried it with children of a tender age, and educated them with European children in orphan asylums; they have there learned to mumble some prayers, even to read and write ”

“ In the second, that is to say, in a general sense, the term race designates the ensemble of all such individuals who have a certain number of characters in common, and who, though differing in other characters, and divided, perhaps, in an indefinite number of natural groups or races, have to each other a greater morphological affinity than they have with the rest of mankind. ”

“ The second point is much more serious, for if accepted without restriction, we must admit that eugenesic hybridity does not exist in mankind, and that all cross-breeds, whatever their origin, whether they are issued from nearly approaching or distant races, not merely the descendants of whites and negroes, but also of Celts and Kimris, are incapable of engendering a durable posterity. ”

“ But the principle of non-intermixture of races being once promulgated, the confusion of terms soon became apparent. The negation which was at first applied merely to the artificial groups formed by the reunion of races of the same type was applied to natural races, and thus arose that frightful proposition, that no mixed races can subsist in humanity. ”

“ But when the intermixture of races is effected in nearly equal proportions, or if it be the result, not of one invasion, but of a constant and abundant immigration, the case is altogether different, and the fusion of the ethnological elements gives rise to a hybrid population, in which the number of individuals of a pure race is constantly diminishing, so that at the termination of a few centuries the representatives of the two primitive types become the exceptions. ”

“ I have already pointed out a cause of error which was not taken into account, and which occurs frequently: it is the change of climate which alone is capable of sterilising a race transplanted into the midst of another race. ”