The human species

by A. de Quatrefages

The former could not affect unlimited contempt for a conquered race who were as civilised as themselves. Their leaders made alliances at an early period with the families of the Incas, and this example was followed. Consequently colour cannot exercise the same influence in Peru as in Brazil or at Buenos Ayres. The numerical predominance of the local race and the conditions of life had then a free field, and their double influence is shown in the result pointed out by Squiers.

IX. Can human crossing, so general in our days, be a new phenomenon in the history of mankind? Evidently not. In the past as in the present, every contact between two races of any continuance, every immigration, and every conquest has led to the formation of a mixed race. It is one of the inevitable consequences of human instincts and of physiological laws.

It is quite natural that polygenists should have neglected facts of this nature. In their opinion a population with mixed characters is a species as much as any other, which is intermediate between two given specific types. But the indifference or the mistake of monogenists is less easily explained. They are evidently ignorant of the phenomena of crossings among plants and animals. When they meet with a race of undecided characters, and which presents more or less distant analogies with two different types, they have generally felt embarrassed, and have put the question on one side, or have at most invoked the action of conditions of life in a vague manner.

It is quite true that the latter, when effecting a resemblance between foreign races and the local race, leads to results analogous to those which result from crossing. We have seen an example of it in the United States. Yet crossing has its peculiar phenomena, which are persistent even after several generations. Moreover, to the indications drawn from physical and physiological characters we may add others borrowed from very different orders of facts, and which, in many cases, permit us to draw a conclusion with remarkable certainty. The mixture of beliefs, customs, and manners often furnishes valuable information. But the comparison of languages generally throws an unexpected light upon problems apparently most difficult. From time to time legends and history confirm inductions drawn from the orders of facts which I have just pointed out, and testify to the correctness of views which, at first sight, might appear conjectural.

As an example I will quote the Zulu Kaffirs. They are one of the groups of which some polygenists make a distinct species. They are in fact distinguished from other negro races by several characters. But by these characters they are brought nearer to the white type. Moreover, various travellers inform us that they present a great variability of feature. Missionaries who have lived among them add that, in the same family, and under conditions which render all crossing impossible, individuals are met with who have the hair and colour of a Negro, and others whose hair is smooth and whose colour is brown. These facts alone would authorise the conclusion that the Zulus are a mixed race.

Philology confirms this conclusion. Philologists agree in placing the Kaffir languages in the group of Zimbian languages, whose grammar and vocabulary are fundamentally negro, but which also include arab, nilotic, and malgach elements. Thus language, as well as physical characters, points to a mixture of blood.

The chronicle discovered by Captain Guillain justifies these conclusions by giving the history of the arab colonies from Quiloa to Sofala. It relates the wars which were raised for the possession of the gold mines; it shows the conquerors driving out the conquered, and compelling them to go southwards to seek a new country. It is evident that the latter have crossed Delagoa Bay, where they have left the black race in its state of original inferiority, and have gone further to ally themselves voluntarily or involuntarily with tribes whose type has thus risen.

In fact, far from being a species, the Zulus are a mixed race of Negroes and Arabs, whose formation is so recent that mediate heredity and atavism still betray the double origin, which is also attested by philology, but in which the negro element preserves a very great superiority.

X. The investigation of mixed populations, the determination of the part played by each of the elements which have assisted in their formation, belong to the most interesting questions of anthropology. This study ought not to stop at populations in which the mixture of characters is evident at first sight. It ought also to bear upon those which are generally regarded as quite pure. We should then find that mixture of races has penetrated where it was scarcely suspected.

In China and especially in Japan, the white allophylian blood is mixed with the yellow blood in different proportions; the white semitic blood has penetrated into the heart of Africa; the negro and houzouana types have mutually penetrated each other and produced all the Kaffir populations situated west of the Zulus of Arabian origin; the Malay races are the result of the amalgamation, in different proportions, of Whites, Yellows, and Blacks; the Malays proper, far from constituting a species, as polygenists consider them, are only one population, in which, under the influence of Islamism, these various elements have been more completely fused, etc.