Further still, thanks to an institution, detestable indeed, but the results of which have been favourable to anthropology, the experiment is complete. The White has enslaved the Negro and taken him away with him to all parts of the globe, and where the local races have consented to intermix with the enslaved race, in every case they have produced mixed races of this inferior division. In America the Zambo is born side by side with the Mulatto and the Mamaluco.
This crossing commenced less than four centuries ago, and some time has elapsed since M. d’Omalius estimated that mixed races constituted at least 1/80 of the entire population of the globe, and he emphatically declared that he had only taken the half-breeds of extreme races into consideration.
In South America, where Whites, Blacks and natives have long been in contact and have intermingled more freely, there are whole States in which half-breeds are in the majority, and in which it is extremely difficult to find a native of pure blood.
Have subterfuges or precautions been necessary to form these unions and to insure the fertility of the offspring? Quite the contrary. The tyranny of the Whites, the crimes of slavery, afford quite sufficient proof that in this case fertility was not dependent upon circumstances, but simply upon the physical connections existing between all men from the lowest of the Negroes to the first of the Whites.
Has such facility, such certainty as this been experienced in the production of chabins and leporides?
If another proof were necessary of the facility with which human groups intercross, it might be found in one of those testimonies the value of which is undisputed because they give the result of a daily experience. In 1861, the Californian legislature declared that any white person convicted of having cohabited with or married a Negro, Mulatto, Chinese or Indian, had forfeited all his rights, and became subject to all the constitutional incapacities imposed upon men of colour. The local press announced very plainly that the object of this measure was the prevention of the fusion and amalgamation of the races.
The Californian legislature acted on this occasion like the proprietor of a flock of pure breed which he is anxious to keep free from all mixture. It was even more severe, ejecting from legal society, not only the offspring of the cross, but also the transgressing parents of the white race.
Do not our breeders take similar precautions in the case of races only, and not in the case of species?
Far from being sterile, unions between human groups apparently the most distinct are sometimes more fertile than those between individuals taken from the same group. “Hottentot women,” says Le Vaillant, “with husbands of their own race have three or four children. With Negroes this number is tripled, and it is still further increased with Whites.” M. Hombron, during four years which he spent in Brazil, Chili and Peru, studied this phenomenon in a large number of families. “I am able to state,” he says, “that unions of Whites with American women have given the highest average of births. Next come the Negro and Negress. And thirdly the Negro and the American woman.” Unions between Americans themselves gave the lowest average.
Thus, the maximum of fertility is here presented in a case which would constitute a hybridism in the opinion of polygenists; the minimum is exhibited between individuals of the same group, and it is with the woman belonging to the latter, that, owing to the cross, the maximum is obtained.