Law.—In historical times, either man (we mean a society of men) who is taken far from his medium does not alter his type, or he entirely disappears.
What nation has been transformed? We cannot answer, even with history in our hand; we know not of any. And yet, the short period of time embraced by the records of mankind would be quite sufficient if it were true, as Isidore Geoffroy thought, that we could conclude from animals to men, and that two thousand years would have been sufficient to alter fundamentally the genus stag.[223] It is a well-known fact, that the inhabitants of the Island of Bourbon, who were colonists established in the high lands for two centuries, have preserved intact the purity of their blood.[224] The Spanish and Portuguese families established in Brazil, and who have carefully avoided foreign marriages, have lost nothing, it is said, of their original characteristics.[225] The Icelanders have not become Laplanders in their own island, and they have now been established there eight hundred years; they are as fair and German-looking as at first.[226] The Dutch have prospered at the Cape under the name of Boers. They say that at Cochin and Malabar there exists a Jewish tribe, which has been established there for a long time, and which traces back its origin to the captivity; it has remained pure,[227] and as similar to the inhabitants of the Jewish quarter at Cairo, as to the Jews in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, and in the pictures of the Flemish school.
Indeed, among ourselves in Europe, have not the Irish preserved, under their foggy and cold sky, that southern nature which is revealed in their taste for certain arts, their small height, their black hair, the vivacity of the women, and the indolence of the men? Now, here is another order of facts,—man is not altered by emigration. Perhaps these facts are not very conclusive to all people, either on account of the difficulty of observation, or the short period which they embrace. They must be taken just as science offers them to us, and we must give our attention solely to reckoning the conclusion from the value of the premises.
We now arrive at the second term of the law which we have laid down,—that man, transported to another country, eventually disappears. The theory which we thus form is of considerable importance. It has even received a particular name, it has been called the Theory of the non-Cosmopolitanism of Man. It is at the present day defended in France by Dr. Boudin, with as much energy as talent. In this matter, facts are abundant enough, and they at once take a considerable significance; and this is determined by figures, so that we must acknowledge that in most cases each race is by its nature attached to the ground which supports it, and that it is not with impunity that it oversteps its limits.
It is because a foreign climate has in general a really destructive influence, producing degeneracy among emigrants, that is to say, a parallel morbid alteration of both the intellect and the body, that we always see the same races moving about in the same areas, and disappear when they pass them.[228] If the Semite, who has left Yemen, has come to pasture his camels near the shores of the ocean, opposite the Fortunate Islands, it is because he and his animals find in the Riff the same conditions of life that they did by the Nile and the Isthmus of Suez. Whatever has been said about the Jews and some other races, not one of them seems to be really cosmopolitan. To admit that a Jewish tribe, thrown into the midst of a black population, has become black by the sole action of the climate, is to admit that there were no conversions, no adoptions, and no sexual unions contrary to the law of Moses; and in this way the philosophic editors of the Code Napoléon, as well as daily medical practice, teach us what to think. For our part, we only see in these transformations of Jewish families, established far away, the result of the absorption of the type of a small group of emigrants by a population which outnumbers them. The Jew has disappeared; the language has been transmitted like the belief, and also the name.
The acclimatisation of man, as well as of the wild animal, takes place only when he finds the conditions of existence sensibly identical with those in which he has been created. Beyond that, nature punishes him for having overstepped the limits which she had assigned to him, and within which he ought to continue to move his organism in relation to this defined medium. The domestic animal, on the contrary, by reason of this malleability of which we have before spoken, accommodates itself in general very conveniently. And the varieties which it shows on recovering its liberty, are of themselves a proof that it has been under a different sky to that of its original country.
Such is, in our opinion, the sole manner of explaining at the present day, in a serious and general point of view, all climateric influences. We must render justice to some monogenists, that they have perfectly understood the real part taken by these influences. Blumenbach calls them causæ degenerationis; and here the German anatomist, in defending, like Prichard, the specific unity of the human race, raises himself above the English anthropologist, without, however, reaching what we believe to be the truth. Prichard, inclining to the belief that humanity is entirely descended from the Negroes,[229] acknowledged, consequently, a kind of causæ perfectionis, that is to say, an ascending march of phenomena, where his predecessor had only seen an inverse march. Now, this ascending march of phenomena is difficult to reconcile with the notion of the specific unity of man. Every species, in fact, is necessarily constituted by reason of the defined space in which it ought to move. It is unreasonable to suppose that elsewhere the same organism and the same species can meet with more favourable conditions of existence.
In Blumenbach’s opinion, all races are unhealthy deviations from a primitive type, of which we are the representatives;[230] so that nine-tenths of the human kind are, according to him, composed of degenerate individuals. Blumenbach did not know that one of the essential characters of degeneracy is the limited development of its produce, that is to say, the disappearance of the race at a more or less distant period.[231] We ask ourselves only how monogenists, who all partake more or less of Blumenbach’s opinions, and who nearly all pride themselves on moral and humanitarian sentiments, can consent to lower in this manner the number of human beings who are worthy of this name? Is not the best part, if there could be one in the case of science, played by the polygenists, who consider that other races are special entities, pursuing an end, which is their own and not ours, and dividing with us the planet, inaccessible in all its extent to the Iranian; just as certain kinds of animals, likewise, cover the globe with different species? Climate, we have said, has a decisive influence upon a man taken to another country; it must only be understood in the sense of this influence, and we have seen that it is generally a pernicious one.[232] It makes itself felt in the physical and moral nature of man, both deeply and superficially.
We may point out among the most simple and the most profound climateric influences, the sun-burn, the study of which is so interesting in anthropological study. We know, at the present day, that the sun is far from being always the cause of it; that a bivouac at night has as powerful an action in the same manner, and that the north-pole explorers found that their hands and faces were browned under a northern sky.[233]
Are these not facts which will diminish the decisive part which has so long been given to solar heat in the production of colouring matter in the Negro?[234] The colour of sun-burn does not even seem to remain in the layers of the epidermis, in which the normal colour is found. Indeed, we must remember, that it is always easy to distinguish a sun-burnt nation, since individuals who, for some reason or other, are but seldom exposed to external influences, like the women, are infinitely whiter; children are quite white when born, but as soon as they go much into the air, they become brown.