The plurality of the human race

by G. Pouchet

It may be seen, and we are bound to make the remark, that we no more pretend to make man a descendant of the ape, than a white man a descendant of a Negro; but it is not impossible, in our opinion, that species of men, as well as the great apes whose relationship hurts our vanity so much, may remount infinitely far in the past to an unknown single species, whose descendants, submitted to multiplied influences, might be modified in different ways by reason of these different influences.

We admit, then, that species is an instant of a constant evolution; that it does not exist by itself; and that it is only an appreciation of our senses, localised by time. In our opinion, if species is fixed, it is fixed after the manner of the sun. That is to say, that we cannot perceive any movement in it beyond the merest trifle.

It requires thousands of years to discover either solar displacement or specific alteration. This is what makes the determination of species so difficult; some of which may be considered as in progress of formation in reference to others. The difficulty is the same with mankind as it is with animals. We would not dare to contradict, for instance, the opinions of those who see in the Hindú, German, and Celtic population three species in course of formation, all three being probably derived from a species anterior to that which history endeavours at the present day to name; that Aryan race of which such a noble picture is made, and which we believe to be primitive because it is in the horizon of history, just as the ancients saw in the ocean the limits of the world. In a short time, perhaps, some discovery in a poor Asiatic field will take away from the Aryas the characteristic nobility and intelligence which we give to them with so much satisfaction. It belongs to human palæontology alone to enlighten us upon the origin of the present human types; it alone can lead us in a sure path towards the great problem of their origin.

But both geology, and palæontology which depends on it, have the singular destiny of showing at one and the same time both great certainties and insoluble doubts. The stratification of rocks, for example, gives us very clearly the notion of the succession of these rocks with regard to one another. But it leaves us in absolute ignorance of all which has passed between the deposit of one stratum and the deposit of that which we meet with above it; in this unknown time all may take place, ten series of rocks may have been placed upon it, and then have been so well mingled together that we cannot discover their individual trace. Who will tell us about the continents engulphed by the sea; has it not already ground up under its waves those memorials of ancient days, which would be so useful to us as a means of reconstructing the history of man? Geology is a gigantic inscription lacerated for ever: each age will decipher some fragment, but we shall never be able to read it in its perfect state.

Besides its great advantages, palæontological inquiry has its great inconveniences. Its advantages are the studying of animal forms which are fixed for ever, and not seeing the field of such studies continually increasing on our view. The limit of its inquiries is the origin of the alluvium; all the facts which we are thereby called upon to study are within this boundary. Palæontology alone, among the sciences of the present day, knows the extent of its domain.

But palæontology, proceeding step by step, by blows of the pickaxe in an otherwise inaccessible mass, is composed of two orders of facts, which must be distinguished one from the other, resting either on affirmative evidence (the existence of organic remains in a rock) or on negative evidence (the absence of organic remains in a rock). Human palæontology itself has its own inconveniences. A bone or a skull of a man are things which are well known; they have not that strange appearance in the eyes of the crowd which makes them take ammonites for petrified serpents, hamites[324] for leeches, radiated animals for stars; when we dig up some singular bone, some carapace of a lizard, a fish, or of some unknown animal, we pick it up, and take great care of it. But if it is a man’s head, it is generally replaced religiously in the earth, and these remains are for ever lost to the scientific world.

There result from all this two sorts of ideas in palæontology, the one positive, the other negative: it is true, however, that the latter diminish continually the profit we obtain from the former, and it is important to remember that this negative evidence is the only basis upon which rests the hypothesis that man is so new to our globe as some imagine. Every moment we may expect to see the interior of the earth prove the contrary. Instead of discoveries following one another, and being linked together as in other sciences, forming a whole which hangs together by itself, palæontology goes on from hand to mouth, as it were, at the caprice of whatever may happen, without knowing the wonder which is about to be revealed, perhaps at a few steps from a path which millions of men have passed by.

It is very true that the human bones which have hitherto been found in the ground in caverns seem to proceed from a form but slightly different from our own; but all this is very recent, relatively to this considerable time of which we have before spoken. Who can say but that we may find very soon a skull which must be classed, whether one will or not, between the anthropomorphous apes and man?

Étienne Geoffroy, led by the logical nature of his ideas, naturally admitted this intermediary form, anterior to our own; but seeing the mammalia of the last geological ages generally larger than those which are contemporary with ourselves, he concluded besides that our immediate ancestors were giants, and that we have degenerated, like the descendants of the bears and hyenas found in caverns.[325] Nothing has appeared in order to justify this hypothesis, and everything seems to show that since that epoch the height of the genus homo has not much altered, whilst the size of the different genera of ferines, ruminants, and pachyderms has positively varied.

Recapitulation. Since we have found that man is comparable in all points to animals, we ought to seek for him and for them a common origin, and the difficulty of admitting an initial miracle has led us to the idea of evolution. If in the science of observation it is permitted to refer to general ideas, assuredly it is so in this case; philosophy commences where science ends, and it belongs to it to give us an explanation of the matter; but we must wait for the future for a true positive solution of the problem, perhaps from advanced geology, perhaps from experiments. The genius of man has no bounds, who can say to what it may reach? who knows whether, like a new Prometheus,[326] a creator in his turn, he may not one day breathe life into some new species, which will suddenly appear from his laboratories?