In face of the difficulties offered by the most liberal interpretation of the Biblical text, and the objection founded on the law regulating the generation of hybrids, it is impossible to pronounce categorically in favour of a multiplicity of origin for the human species.

We must therefore be content to assign a lower cause to those clear-cut varieties of which the main quality is undoubtedly their permanence, a permanence that can only be lost by a crossing of blood. We can identify this cause with the amount of climatic energy possessed by the earth at a time when the human race had just appeared on its surface. There is no doubt that the forces that inorganic nature could bring into play were far greater then than anything we have known since, and under their pressure racial modifications were accomplished which would now be impossible. Probably, too, the creatures exposed to these tremendous forces were more liable to be affected by them than existing types would be. Man, in his earliest stages, assumed many unstable forms; he did not perhaps belong, in any definite manner, to the white, red, or yellow variety. The deviations that transformed the primitive characteristics of the species into the types established to-day were probably much smaller than those that would now be required for the black race, for example, to become assimilated to the white, or the yellow to the black. On this hypothesis, we should have to regard Adamite man as equally different from all the existing human groups; these would have radiated all around him, the distance between him and any group being double that between one group and another. How much of the primitive type would the peoples of the different races have subsequently retained? Merely the most general characteristics of our species, the vague resemblances of shape common to the most distant groups, and the possibility of expressing their wants by articulate sounds—but nothing more. The remaining features peculiar to primitive man would have been completely lost, by the black as well as the non-black races; and although we are all originally descended from him, we should have owed to outside influences everything that gave us our distinctive and special character. Henceforth the human races, the product of cosmic forces as well as of the primitive Adamic stock, would be very slightly, if at all, related to each other. The power of giving birth to fertile hybrids would certainly be a perpetual proof of original connexion; but it would be the only one. As soon as the primal differences of environment had given each group its isolated character, as a possession for ever—its shape, features, and colour—from that moment the link of primal unity would have been suddenly snapped; the unity, so far as influence on racial development went, would be actually sterile. The strict and unassailable permanence of form and feature to which the earliest historical documents bear witness would be the charter and sign-manual of the eternal separation of races.

CHAPTER XII
HOW THE RACES WERE PHYSIOLOGICALLY SEPARATED, AND THE DIFFERENT VARIETIES FORMED BY THEIR INTER-MIXTURE. THEY ARE UNEQUAL IN STRENGTH AND BEAUTY

The question of cosmic influences is one that ought to be fully cleared up, as I am confining myself to arguments based on it. The first problem with which I have to deal is the following:—“How could men, whose common origin implies a single starting-point, have been exposed to such a diversity of influences from without?” After the first separation of races, the groups were already numerous enough to be found under totally different conditions of climate; how then, considering the immense difficulties they had to contend against, the vast forests and marshy plains they had to cross, the sandy or snowy deserts, the rivers, lakes, and oceans—how, with all these obstacles, did they manage to cover distances which civilized man to-day, with all his developed power, can only surmount with great toil and trouble? To answer these objections, we must try to discover where the human species had its original home.

A very ancient idea, adopted also by some great modern minds, such as Cuvier, is that the different mountain-systems must have served as the point of departure for certain races. According to this theory, the white races, and even certain African varieties whose skull is shaped like our own, had their first settlement in the Caucasus. The yellow race came down from the ice-bound heights of the Altai. Again, the tribes of prognathous negroes built their first huts on the southern slopes of Mount Atlas, and made this the starting-point of their first migrations. Thus, the frightful places of the earth, difficult of access and full of gloomy horror—torrents, caverns, icy mountains, eternal snows, and impassable abysses—were actually more familiar to primitive ages than any others; while all the terrors of the unknown lurked, for our first ancestors, in the uncovered plains, on the banks of the great rivers, on the coasts of the lakes and seas.

The chief motive urging the ancient philosophers to put forward this theory, and the moderns to revive it, seems to have been the idea that, in order to pass successfully through the great physical crises of the world, mankind must have collected on the mountain heights, where the floods and inundations could not reach them. This large and general interpretation of the tradition of Ararat may suit perhaps the later epochs, when the children of men had covered the face of the earth; but it is quite inapplicable to the time of relative calm that marked their first appearance. It is also contrary to all theories as to the unity of the species. Again, mountains from the remotest times have been the object of profound terror and religious awe. On them has been set, by all mythologies, the abode of the gods. It was on the snowy peak of Olympus, it was on Mount Meru that the Greeks and the Brahmans imagined their divine synods. It was on the summit of the Caucasus that Prometheus suffered the mysterious punishment of his still more mysterious crime. If men had begun by making their home in the remote heights, it is not likely that their imagination would have caused them to raise these to the height of heaven itself. We have a scant respect for what we have seen and known and trodden underfoot. There would have been no divinities but those of the waters and the plains. Hence I incline to the opposite belief, that the flat and uncovered regions witnessed the first steps of man. This is, by the way, the Biblical notion.[[89]] After the first settlements were made in these parts, the difficulties of accounting for migrations are sensibly diminished; for flat regions are generally cut by rivers and reach down to the sea, and so there would have been no need to undertake the difficult task of crossing forests, deserts, and great marshes.

There are two kinds of migrations, the voluntary and the unexpected. The former are out of the question in very early times. The latter are more possible, and more probable too, among shiftless and unprepared savages than among civilised nations. A family huddled together on a drifting raft, a few unfortunate people surprised by an inrush of the sea, clinging to trunks of trees, and caught up by the currents—these are enough to account for a transplantation over long distances. The weaker man is, the more is he the sport of inorganic forces. The less experience he has, the more slavishly does he respond to accidents which he can neither foresee nor avoid. There are striking examples of the ease with which men can be carried, in spite of themselves, over considerable distances. Thus, we hear that in 1696 two large canoes from Ancorso, containing about thirty savages, men and women, were caught in a storm, and after drifting aimlessly some time, finally arrived at Samal, one of the Philippine Islands, three hundred leagues from their starting-point. Again, four natives of Ulea were carried out to sea in a canoe by a sudden squall. They drifted about for eight months, and reached at last one of the Radack Islands, at the eastern end of the Caroline Archipelago, after an involuntary voyage of 550 leagues. These unfortunate men lived solely on fish, and carefully collected every drop of rain they could. When rain failed them, they dived into the depths of the sea and drank the water there, which, they say, is less salt. Naturally, when they reached Radack, the travellers were in a deplorable state; but they soon rallied, and were eventually restored to health.[[90]]

These two examples are a sufficient witness for the rapid diffusion of human groups in very different regions, and under the most varied local conditions. If further proofs were required, we might mention the ease with which insects, plants, and testaceans are carried all over the world; it is, of course, unnecessary to show that what happens to such things may, a fortiori, happen more easily to man.[[91]] The land-testaceans are thrown into the sea by the destruction of the cliffs, and are then carried to distant shores by means of currents. Zoophytes attach themselves to the shells of molluscs or let their tentacles float on the surface of the sea, and so are driven along by the wind to form distant colonies. The very trees of unknown species, the very sculptured planks, the last of a long line, which were cast up on the Canaries in the fifteenth century, and by providing a text for the meditations of Christopher Columbus paved the way for the discovery of the New World—even these probably carried on their surface the eggs of insects; and these eggs were hatched, by the heat engendered by new sap, far from their place of origin and the land where lived the others of their kind.

Thus there is nothing against the notion that the first human families might soon have been separated, and lived under very different conditions of climate, in regions far apart from each other. But it is not necessary, even under present circumstances, for the places to be far apart, in order to ensure a variation in the temperature, and in the local conditions resulting from it. In mountainous countries like Switzerland, the distance of a few miles makes such a difference in the soil and atmosphere, that we find the flora of Lapland and Southern Italy practically side by side; similarly in Isola Madre, on Lago Maggiore, oranges, great cacti, and dwarf palms grow in the open, in full view of the Simplon. We need not confine ourselves to mountains; the temperature of Normandy is lower than that of Jersey, while in the narrow triangle formed by the Western coasts of France, the vegetation is of the most varied character.[[92]]

The contrasts must have been tremendous, even over the smallest areas, in the days that followed the first appearance of our species on the globe. The selfsame place might easily become the theatre of vast atmospheric revolutions, when the sea retreated or advanced by the inundation or drying up of the neighbouring regions; when mountains suddenly rose in enormous masses, or sank to the common level of the earth, so that the plains covered what once was their crests; and when tremors, that shook the axis of the earth, and by affecting its equilibrium and the inclination of the poles to the ecliptic, came to disturb the general economy of the planet.