Owing to my respect for a scientific authority which I cannot overthrow, and, still more, for a religious interpretation that I could not venture to attack, I must resign myself to leaving on one side the grave doubts that are always oppressing me as to the question of original unity; and I will now try to discover as far as I can, with the resources that are still left to me, the probable causes of these ultimate physiological differences.
As no one will venture to deny, there broods over this grave question a mysterious darkness, big with causes that are at the same time physical and supernatural. In the inmost recesses of the obscurity that shrouds the problem, reign the causes which have their ultimate home in the mind of God; the human spirit feels their presence without divining their nature, and shrinks back in awful reverence. It is probable that the earthly agents to whom we look for the key of the secret are themselves but instruments and petty springs in the great machine. The origins of all things, of all events and movements, are not infinitely small, as we are often pleased to say, but on the contrary so vast, so immeasurable by the poor foot-rule of man’s intelligence, that while we may perhaps have some vague suspicion of their existence, we can never hope to lay hands on them or attain to any sure discovery of their nature. Just as in an iron chain that is meant to lift up a great weight it frequently happens that the link nearest the object is the smallest, so the proximate cause may often seem insignificant; and if we merely consider it in isolation, we tend to forget the long series that has gone before. This alone gives it meaning, but this, in all its strength and might, derives from something that human eye has never seen. We must not therefore, like the fool in the old adage, wonder at the power of the roseleaf to make the water overflow; we should rather think that the reason of the accident lay in the depths of the water that filled the vessel to overflowing. Let us yield all respect to the primal and generating causes, that dwell far off in heaven, and without which nothing would exist; conscious of the Divine power that moves them, they rightly claim a part of the veneration we pay to their Infinite Creator. But let us abstain from speaking of them here. It is not fitting for us to leave the human sphere, where alone we may hope to meet with certainty. All we can do is to seize the chain, if not by the last small link, at any rate by that part of it which we can see and touch, without trying to catch at what is beyond our reach—a task too difficult for mortal man. There is no irreverence in saying this; on the contrary, it expresses the sincere conviction of a weakness that is insurmountable.
Man is a new-comer in this world. Geology—proceeding merely by induction, but attacking its problems in a marvellously systematic way—asserts that man is absent from all the oldest strata of the earth’s surface. There is no trace of him among the fossils. When our ancestors appeared for the first time in an already aged world, God, according to Scripture, told them that they would be its masters and have dominion over everything on earth. This promise was given not so much to them as to their descendants; for these first feeble creatures seem to have been provided with very few means, not merely of conquering the whole of nature, but even of resisting its weakest attacks.[[84]] The ethereal heavens had seen, in former epochs, beings far more imposing than man rise from the muddy earth and the deep waters. Most of these gigantic races had, no doubt, disappeared in the terrible revolutions in which the inorganic world had shown a power so immeasurably beyond that possessed by animate nature. A great number, however, of these monstrous creatures were still living. Every region was haunted by herds of elephants and rhinoceroses, and even the mastodon has left traces of its existence in American tradition.[[85]]
These last remnants of the monsters of an earlier day were more than enough to impress the first members of our species with an uneasy feeling of their own inferiority, and a very modest view of their problematic royalty. It was not merely the animals from whom they had to wrest their disputed empire. These could in the last resort be fought, by craft if not by force, and in default of conquest could be avoided by flight. The case was quite different with Nature, that immense Nature that surrounded the primitive families on all sides, held them in a close grip, and made them feel in every nerve her awful power.[[86]] The cosmic causes of the ancient cataclysms, although feebler, were always at work. Partial upheavals still disturbed the relative positions of earth and ocean. Sometimes the level of the sea rose and swallowed up vast stretches of coast; sometimes a terrible volcanic eruption would vomit from the depths of the waters some mountainous mass, to become part of a continent. The world was still in travail, and Jehovah had not calmed it by “seeing that it was good.”
This general lack of equilibrium necessarily reacted on atmospheric conditions. The strife of earth, fire, and water brought with it complete and rapid changes of heat, cold, dryness, and humidity. The exhalations from the ground, still shaken with earthquake, had an irresistible influence on living creatures. The causes that enveloped the globe with the breath of battle and suffering could not but increase the pressure brought to bear by nature on man. Differences of climate and environment acted on our first parents far more effectively than to-day. Cuvier, in his “Treatise on the revolutions of the globe,” says that the inorganic forces of the present day would be quite incapable of causing convulsions and upheavals, or new arrangements of the earth’s surface, such as those to which geology bears witness. The changes that were wrought in the past on her own body by the awful might of nature would be impossible to-day; she had a similar power over the human race, but has it no longer. Her omnipotence has been so lost, or at least so weakened and whittled away, that in a period of years covering roughly half the life of our species on the earth, she has brought about no change of any importance, much less one that can be compared to that by which the different races were for ever marked off from each other.[[87]]
Two points are certain: first that the main differences between the branches of our race were fixed in the earliest epoch of our terrestrial life; secondly, that in order to imagine a period when these physiological cleavages could have been brought about, we must go back to the time when the influence of natural causes was far more active than it is now, under the normal and healthy conditions. Such a time could be none other than that immediately after the creation, when the earth was still shaken by its recent catastrophes and without any defence against the fearful effects of their last death-throes.
Assuming the unitarian theory, we cannot give any later date for the separation of types.
No argument can be based on the accidental deviations from the normal which are sometimes found in certain individual instances, and which, if transmitted, would certainly give rise to important varieties. Without including such deformities as a hump-back, some curious facts have been collected which seem, at first sight, to be of value in explaining the diversity of races. To cite only one instance, Prichard[[88]] quotes Baker’s account of a man whose whole body, with the exception of his face, was covered with a sort of dark shell, resembling a large collection of warts, very hard and callous, and insensible to pain; when cut, it did not bleed. At different periods this curious covering, after reaching a thickness of three-quarters of an inch, would become detached, and fall off; it was then replaced by another, similar in all respects. Four sons were born to him, all resembling their father. One survived; but Baker, who saw him in infancy, does not say whether he reached manhood. He merely infers that since the father has produced such offspring, “a race of people may be propagated by this man, having such rugged coats and coverings as himself; and if this should ever happen, and the accidental original be forgotten, it is not improbable they might be deemed a different species of mankind.”
Such a conclusion is possible. Individuals, however, who are so different as these from the species in general, do not transmit their characteristics. Their posterity either returns to the regular path or is soon extinguished. All things that deviate from the natural and normal order of the world can only borrow life for a time; they are not fitted to keep it. Otherwise, a succession of strange accidents would, long before this, have set mankind on a road far removed from the physiological conditions which have obtained, without change, throughout the ages. We must conclude that impermanence is one of the essential and basic features of these anomalies. We could not include in such a category the woolly hair and black skin of the negro, or the yellow colour, wide face, and slanting eyes of the Chinaman. These are all permanent characteristics; they are in no way abnormal, and so cannot come from an accidental deviation.
We will now give a summary of the present chapter.