The human species

by A. de Quatrefages

Carried away by the heat of controversy with those naturalists who admit the unity of the geographical origin of man, Agassiz goes much further than this. He considers the various languages as being of primitive origin as well as all other characters. Men, he asserts, were created by nations, each of which appeared upon the globe with its own language. He draws a comparison between these languages and the voices of animals; he laughs at philologists for their belief in the discovery of any connection between one language and another. In his opinion, there is just as much relation between one human language and another, as between the growling of different species of bears, the mewing of the cats of the two continents, the quacking of ducks, or the song of thrushes, who all pour forth their gay and harmonious notes, each in its dialect, which is neither inherited nor derived from another.

Philologists will most certainly reject the law as laid down by Agassiz. But I must also protest against the comparison admitted by this illustrious naturalist. If I attribute a language to animals, I do not forget how rudimentary it is. I recollect that no animal has ever learnt the language of another. I know too well the distance there is between animal interjections and articulate speech, and I am as well aware as anyone that to use such an instrument, so as to produce from it true languages, can only be accomplished by the superior intelligence of man.

Agassiz, when he had arrived at this point, must have felt that he had lost himself, and that, in trying to harmonise the idea of a single human species with that of several races of distinct origin, he was entering an endless labyrinth. His last work betrays the signs of this embarrassment only too clearly. It is probably in the hope of escaping from it that the author has finally even denied the existence of species. After having again rejected the criterion drawn from crossing and degrees of fertility, he adds: “With it disappears in its turn the pretended reality of species as opposed to the mode of existence of genera, families, orders, classes and branches. Reality of existence is, in fact, possessed by individuals alone.” Thus, from adhering solely to morphology, from a disregard of the physical side of the question, from having allowed themselves to be guided by a logic which is only founded upon incomplete data, Agassiz and Darwin have arrived at a similar result. Both have disregarded this great fact, intelligible to common sense, demonstrated by science, and which governs everything in zoology, as it does in botany, the division, namely, of organised beings into elementary and fundamental groups which propagate in space and time. But Darwin, starting from the phenomena of variations which are presented by these beings, considers species as only races. Agassiz, entirely preoccupied with the phenomena of fixity, finally considers individuals only as existing in living nature. Both forget that the great Buffon passed successively to both these extremes only to return again to the doctrine which includes and explains all facts, and which may be summed up in these words: distinction of race and species.

III. In spite of these dogmatic assertions, when it comes to application of any kind whatever, Agassiz, like Lamarck in former times, and Darwin in our own day, is obliged to use the word species in the sense in which it is employed by so many others. In the memoir, from which I have already quoted, animal and vegetable species are constantly being discussed. Their geographical distribution serves as a foundation to the theory of human origins. The author admits that they could not have arisen upon one and the same point of the globe; that the centres of creation were numerous, and that the species diverging from these centres give to the actual flora and fauna all their characteristic features.

Up to this point Agassiz has only accepted the doctrine of centres of creation, a doctrine entirely French in origin, having been formulated by Desmoulins and developed by M. Edwards.

What is due to Agassiz is the reproduction, in the name of science, of a theory at first proposed by La Peyrère in the name of theology: giving to man the whole world as his original home: the admission that the human races originated in the same places as the groups of animal and vegetable species, and the connection of one of these races with each centre of creation; the multiplication of the number of human creations to such a degree as to profess that “man was created by nations,” endowed from the first with all their distinctive characters, and each speaking its own special language.

There is, at first sight, no absurdity in the idea itself, nothing at all contradictory to anything which we have as yet met with. We have seen above that physiology leads to the conclusion that “human groups are to all appearance descended from one primitive pair.” It goes no further than that. Anyone who confines himself to inferences drawn from this order of facts might, therefore, accept the theory of Agassiz as, it is true, a very gratuitous hypothesis, but convenient in order to account for the distribution and actual diversity of human types.

This is no longer the case when we turn to another branch of the natural sciences, zoological and botanical geography. We then can easily prove that the theories of Agassiz tend to make an exception of man, to place him at variance with the general laws of the geographical distribution of all other organised beings, and, consequently, that they are false.

IV. I fully agree with the views of Agassiz, as far as centres of creation, or rather centres of appearance are concerned.

All who confine themselves to the data of observation and experiment will see at once that all animal and vegetable species could not have originated upon any one spot of the globe. The former shows us, in various regions, different types and species, living naturally in countries which present almost precisely the same conditions of existence. The latter teaches us that we can transport the greater number of species from one region to another, and that they will prosper there, if the conditions of existence are the same; that, on the contrary, arctic and tropical species cannot, even temporarily, be submitted to the action of the same conditions; that neither can withstand the action of a temperate climate. It is impossible with all these facts to avoid the conclusion that plants and animals had several points of appearance.