The plurality of the human race

by G. Pouchet

The differences which we call physiological are very numerous; we shall, however, only quote two or three from among the most striking. The principal point, perhaps, is the peculiar smell of the Negro. This is so strong, that it even impregnates for some time a place where a Negro may only have remained for a few hours, and it is so characteristic, that it alone constitutes a grave presumption in matters of slave-trading; for Humboldt has stated concerning the Peruvians what Le Cat and Haller said about the savages of the Antilles, that they could perfectly trace a Negro by scent, thanks to this odour; and it is, at the same time, a new proof of the sensitive perfection of the American race. This odour is quite independent of age, and sometimes is almost insupportable in young children; it is also independent of sweat, and, in fact, of all the means of cleanliness of which a Negro can make use.[146] It is due, according to all appearance, to a secretion from the same glands which, in the white man, give such a peculiar odour to the arm-pits; but this latter is absolutely different from that of the Negro.[147] With regard to this, we must not lose the occasion of noticing one of those contradictions into which monogenists have so often fallen, and, indeed, it could not be otherwise. “The dog does not come from the jackal,” says M. Flourens,[148] “for the jackal has such a peculiar smell, that it does not seem possible that, in this case, the dog should not have preserved some traces of it at least.” Shall we reason in the same manner in order to make a special race of the Negro, and would this monogenist accept it?

Another very remarkable physiological peculiarity, and one quite as worthy of being noticed, since it has a certain effect upon physiognomy, upon the facies of a race, is a special mode of standing, consisting in holding oneself in a squatting position, the sole of the foot on the ground, and the thighs bent up against the hams, without the ischia touching the ground. This effect is what Cook called “a monkey countenance.”[149]

We find nowhere that the Greeks,—the inhabitants of the ancient continent generally,—the Arabs, or even the ancient Egyptians themselves, have ever been accustomed to this position, which necessarily implies some anatomical modification, whether it be in the separation of the pelvis, the direction of the neck of the thigh-bone, or the torsion of the bones, etc.[150] This position seems, on the contrary, to have been always the peculiarity of the Melanesian races; it is the ordinary mode of standing among the inhabitants in the upper course of the Nile, and the Negroes of Africa and the Oceanic Islands. They place themselves thus in order to look at anything, to chat together, or to deliberate. The magnificent drawings which illustrate the account of the travels of the English Embassy to the Emperor of Abyssinia,[151] represent this monarch as reviewing an entire army of infantry drawn up in order of battle, and all squatting in this manner.

The ancient Egyptians generally kept themselves either on their knees or seated on the ground, the legs brought together, and the knees touching in front of the chest, as thousands of statues, figures, and pictures show us. But their artists have just revealed to us that the people of Central Africa have always been as they are at the present day. The great painting of Beït-Oually, in Nubia,[152] represents Rameses the Great as charging a troop of Negroes from Soudan; on one side, farther off, we see a Negro near a saucepan, preparing, doubtless, some food; he is squatting in the manner of which we have just spoken. In this place, as is often the case, the Egyptian artist has been clever in seizing a profile by its most significant characteristic.[153]

Géricault wished at one time to make a drawing of an episode in the “Shipwreck of the Medusa,” Coréard making signs to an African chief who was seated on the sand; he placed in his composition a Negro squatting, but he drew him with one foot resting entirely on the ground, and the other bearing only on the extremity of the metatarsi. At that time Géricault had only a white man as a model; a Negro would have placed himself differently, with both his feet flat on the ground.

We might pursue the history of these physiological varieties ad infinitum,—it is a large field for the enquirer; and to mention one fact alone, the compared history of development among the different races of mankind has still to be accomplished, especially the history of the intra-uterine development of the Negro, and even partly the history of the first months of his aërial life.

III. If organism, operating normally among different races, presents such varieties, why can we not suppose that it would hence show correlative differences in its morbid changes? should there not be, also, an ethnic pathology? This contains a large question, and yet it was scarcely thought of a few years ago. It seems to have been first proposed and studied by F. Schnurrer in his treatise on Geographical Pathology,[154] in 1813, in which the author seems to have perceived imperfectly, in all its vastness, the matter which now occupies our attention. The book is divided into three parts; the first is entirely geographical, the second entirely anthropological, and the third is given up to a description of maladies, commencing with two introductory chapters; the first describing the diseases of each zone, and the second, containing eleven pages, is a “Glance at the general Characteristics of Disease in each Race.” “In fact,” says Dr. Boudin,[155] in pointing out the novelty of these enquiries, “there are some races who show themselves completely rebellious to certain pathological forms, for which others, on the contrary, show a remarkable pre-disposition.”

Two particular maladies have been pointed out in this point of view,—marsh-poisoning in all its forms, and yellow fever. Africans are evidently, at least in parts, exempt from these two diseases, which only attack them with a very minor force. It has been said that the question of marsh-poisoning is still very doubtful; it was allowed that the Negroes were less exposed to its attacks than other men, but it was desired to enter the question of acclimatisation[156] into the calculation of facts. All the countries we know that are inhabited by blacks, being nearly all subject to the noxious influence of marshes, it was pretended that even stranger Negroes had acquired from infancy, in their own country, an immunity by which they benefited later in life, and even had the power of handing it down to their descendants.[157] It is thus that some have explained, for instance, the unhappy results of the English expedition to the Niger in 1841. Out of 145 whites belonging to the crews, the three vessels, after a navigation of about forty-nine days on the river, had lost 40 men (130 were attacked). Out of the twenty-five coloured men embarked in England, and who were mostly born in America, eleven were seized with illness, but not one of them died.[158] This individual acclimatisation can only be either a fiction, or a proof in support of the ideas which we defend. In the presence of a morbid influence which shows itself and continues, two things alone can happen,—either destruction, or permanent (that is to say, specific) modifications of œconomy, in harmony with the ordinary manner in which this animal population continues to exist.

The yellow fever, exercising its ravages upon shores equally distant from whites and negroes, has brought very decisive arguments into the question. We know, in fact, that the whites suffer in America from the black vomit in all its violence; whilst the Negroes are not attacked by it, or if they are, its effects are insignificant.[159] A ferocious maxim, one worthy of the conquerors, has explained—since the sixteenth century—this prerogative, which the Spaniards had so much reason to envy, “If we did not hang a Negro, he would never die.”[160] If some authors have timidly advanced the theory of a former acclimatisation[161] with regard to marsh-poisoning, the greater number of observers, Fenner, Nott, and Bryant, ought to admit that there was, even in the constitution of the black man, an obstacle—otherwise absolutely unknown in his nature—to the manifestation of the yellow fever;[162] and that the black blood appeared to carry on this resisting force to the mixed breed, even if they were born far away.[163]

An extremely interesting experiment relating to this immunity of the Negro from the yellow fever, was tried largely during the disastrous Mexican expedition, and the conditions of this experience ought to give it a capital value. At first, our soldiers paid a terrible tribute to this scourge, and then the French Government took up the excellent idea of profiting by the resistance of the Negro race to the black vomit. It asked for a battalion of blacks from the viceroy of Egypt, consisting of men recruited from the limits of Soudan, from Berber to Khartoum. It was not without anxiety that the issue of this physiological experiment was watched, since it did not happen, as in our laboratories, in anima vili. Some had confidence in the functional uniformity of the Negro race, as being beyond all local action; others believing wrongly, as we said, in a former acclimatisation of the only inhabitants of the western coast of Africa, expected to find that all these Negroes from the other side of the continent would perish. However, in spite of what they had at first said, they could very soon verify the almost complete immunity of the Negro battalion at Vera-Cruz.[164] It was the first time, if we are not mistaken, that anthropology has been directly applied in the Old World to social science. Some time ago anthropologists were consulted by the government of the Northern States of America upon certain questions of slavery, at the time when terrible dissensions were budding in the shadows of the distance.