Certain families of languages do not differ solely by their constitution, they show special phonetic or physiological qualities;[205] that is to say, we can observe, in two different languages, varieties of the same order which is explained among animals, by the words barking, braying, cooing, etc. This is particularly the case with the strange language spoken by the clear-complexioned race of South Africa, probably much more widely diffused in former times than at present. It resembles no other known language, and consists in a clucking which has, they say, nothing analogous to it among any other nation on the earth. The English have characterised it by the names of sighing, or clucking, and also especially click language.[206] Here is a new difference,—a radical difference in relation to so many others, which decidedly forms, from these Bosjesmans, a people whom it is impossible to ally, it does not signify how, or under what aspect, to any other of the divisions of the great human family.
CHAPTER VI.
THE INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE.
Monogenists—starting from unity of origin as a fact, if not proved, at least accepted and unquestionable,—were necessarily led to discover a physiological explanation of the profound differences which we find at the present day among mankind, and which would have led them, according to monogenists, from one extreme state to the other, or from a medium state to the two extremes.
Now, it is necessary to remember that every question concerning influence implies a previous historic notion. We cannot establish that a modification is not produced in a body (here is humanity), except by comparing it with itself at two distinct moments of duration, more or less distant. When a monogenist admits as an origin one uniform human race, he places a term of comparison in the past, he gives an historical date more or less definite to this uniform human species. And it is because religious cosmogonies alone dare, at the present day, to arrogate to themselves the power of making history dart back to the commencement of humanity, that we shall always be much troubled by not seeing a theological influence as the basis of monogenist ideas; now, they say, however, that they have discovered the trace of this human uniformity upon which they rely, in order to prove this great historical fact.
In our own opinion, history is very far from commencing with mankind; it only goes back two or three ages before the invention of figurative language,—a more important and difficult language for man than articulated language, which was discovered long before, and at many different points. It is writing which makes the Asiatics and the lost people of Central America better than savages; and if we were asked for a specific distinction with regard to intelligence between mankind and animals, we should only be able to find it there. It will be seen later that we are far from denying the influence of a middle course; but we maintain that every term of comparison is wanting at the present day to show that man, since the most distant historic periods, has ever shown less dissimilarities than now. Most monogenists, disagreeing about the whole system of modifying causes, agree generally in acknowledging that climates and hybridity have a decisive creative influence as regards races of men. These two kinds of influence alone deserve our consideration. We shall commence by climate, putting on one side, for the present, the study of the specious question of hybridity, whose part is so badly understood by those who believe that it creates varieties, when it can only weaken differences.
An important part in the means of alteration from one race to another has been given, by Hippocrates, to external influences. He seems to have been the first to point this out, in his Treatise on Air, Water, and Places.[207] “The form, colour, and manners of nations,” says Polybius, “depend solely on the diversity of climates.”[208] In general, the ancients believed in the immediate and sudden influence of climate, so much so that a stranger, at the end of a few years, would be completely changed and altered to the type of the inhabitants of the same place.
In our days, Cabanis alone has dared to go so far as this.[209]
Some monogenists have simply enlarged Grecian theories, and explained everything by the prolonged duration of the same influences. Others have supposed that local changes in the atmospheric conditions of the world, anterior to the actual epoch, were the cause. This is a sort of progress beyond the preceding hypothesis, in the sense that at least we must recognise the insufficiency of actually existing causes, in order to explain the great differences observed at the present day between men. Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire has agreed with his father upon the great question of the influence of the surrounding medium; but death seized him before he could apply these theories to mankind. However, the high position that his Histoire Naturelle Générale has taken in science obliges us to pause a moment on the subject of his opinions, which have, besides, easily triumphed over the ruins of Cuvier’s school. And if we do not agree with all the doctrines propounded by the second Geoffroy, we are all the more satisfied, since, differing from the son, we incline more to the theories of the father.