The plurality of the human race

by G. Pouchet

Craniology is not anthropology; it assists it materially, but the partial results which it obtains have not necessarily the same value in the more general point of view of anthropology. Every classification, based on the form of the skull, will be necessarily an artificial classification, because it will only rest upon one sole order of phenomena. Besides, this study presents great difficulties from the individual differences which the various heads show, in which the qualities belonging to the individual have been so far able to hide the general characters of the race, that these often remain unrecognisable. Divisions have also increased in proportion as craniological collections have come richer in specimens. Morton only reckoned eleven human races, but he believed under the truth. We may very well have a poor idea of the value of this classification by studying the materials which were used by the philosopher of Philadelphia. Besides the American race, Morton had only a very few skulls at his disposal. The Philadelphian collection, which has been much increased since his death, contained, only a few years ago, 1035 skulls, 38 of them pathological; there remain therefore but 997. Out of this number the American race figures in 502, or more than one-half. There remains, therefore 495, 154 of which came from the valley of the Nile; so that merely 350 skulls represent the whole of Europe, Asia, the Oceanic countries, and Africa (excepting Egypt). This is not much for the purpose of classing a population likely to be raised to five hundred millions of inhabitants.[336]

It remains for us to study and determine the intrinsic value of each of these heads. The authentic production of a skull is not always easy to be established when it comes from the other side of the world, obtained by travellers who have not made a special study of anthropology; it is even less so when a skull is dug up in a burial ground, where there may be a certain promiscuousness very apt to hinder our inquiries. Errors of this kind steal into science only too often, and we have for a long time in particular objected to the name of Gallic mummy, which has been given to a body in a collection at Paris, the history of which does not at all justify this denomination, since we simply believe that when it was first dug up it was only referred back to the thirteenth century![337]

Craniology was anthropology itself, whilst this science was being cultivated merely by learned men in their studies. If a skull does not always bear about it the stamp of the race to which it belongs, we must nevertheless own that it is the best representative of the dead individual. Craniology obtains all its weight and powers from the study of ancient races and extinct peoples. There it ought to intervene with an unequalled importance, for want of better points of reference. By its means anthropology can search in the past, clearing up those questions which history is incapable of explaining. In this manner Morton has been able to prove better than by any historical document that Ancient Egypt was inhabited by very mixed races, and composed of the most different elements, exactly as in our own days. But there remained a problem even more interesting: that of knowing if the different races who then inhabited the banks of the Nile were as much divided into various occupations as at the present day: the Albanians are all soldiers, the Copts all scribes and officials, the Fellahs all labourers, etc. Doubtless it would be possible, if not easy, to arrive at the solution of this new problem by collecting skulls and mummies with more care than has hitherto been done, and, above all, by assisting the researches of the Egyptiologists, who can read upon the coffin that such and such a body is that of a workman, a priest, or a king. We may thus be able to ascertain if the kings of such or such a dynasty were black or yellow; if the dominant population of such or such a nome had the Coptic, Berberine, or Fellah type. Here we have a large field for study, which has been almost entirely neglected by the American school of anthropology, precisely because Morton found himself without information about the production and true age of the immense materials which he had at his disposal.

But we must not be forgetful: the classification of skulls by their shape, of hairs by their colour, or skins by their hue, is not the classification of races of mankind. We only perceive here one order of phenomena. A classification established upon such bases has its point of departure only in the mind of him who conceived it, and not in the nature of things.

We shall only have a natural and rational classification by comparing entire individuals one with the other.[338] To this we must come; we must study at one and the same time the height, the skin with its dependencies, and, above all, the character of the countenance, the attitude, the facies, and the habitus of different races, which Caldwell called “the variety discoverable in the complexion and feature, the figure and stature of the human race;[339]” this something is explained in one word, which we call type, about which we are never mistaken, and which makes us say, “This is a man from the south, that is a man from the north; this is a Mongolian, that an Indian.”[340] By this means alone we can form natural groups; difficulties will, doubtless, be great at the beginning, but light will come little by little, and time will teach us surely to distinguish certain distinctive characteristics, whose expression will be gradually more and more simple. This is a work for the future.

Anthropology regarding man as a whole, classifiers ought not to neglect his psychological value. Although craniology is only an indirect appreciation of the same, few had ever thought, Linnæus excepted, of using the purely intellectual characteristics of races in order to assist them in classification, when all at once the American school gave an immense importance to these characteristics, and placed psychological varieties above all the material differences which can be observed in the configuration of the bony case of the skull. The American school has gone too far, for it is tangible forms especially which must furnish specific characteristics in the animal kingdom.

However this may be, we may willingly give a secondary value to the intellectual classification of the human race, although data are still wanting in order to establish one which can be considered as complete. We will even add that the characteristics of this order are the more authentic and the more precious since they are not the expression of a given moment, nor that of a certain number of individuals. They belong to a whole race.

We must seek for them in the literary remains of a people. These teach us surely, even after many ages have elapsed, about the mind, belief, and thoughts of their readers. The monuments of plastic art remain, even if they were a complete contradiction against their time, their epoch, the men who ordered them, and the crowd which now regards without understanding them.[341] A book, on the contrary, has no success except as it enters into the mind of a people,—except as the ideas which it expresses are those of all the world. Each book which is published, then (like the Mosaic books among the Jews, the Korán amongst the Mussulmen), is the true expression of the mind of a race at all the periods of its existence, even were it written in a language which is no longer spoken. The best Greek and Roman works, written for men of the same blood as ourselves, have remained classical. We must understand them, even at the present day, and we do understand them, because the thoughts which animated their authors are still our own. If, on the contrary, we wish to penetrate into any foreign literature, it becomes a labour and a fatigue, we only reach it by making an abstraction of our thoughts and our ideas, by endeavouring to enter entirely, by a violent effort, into the life and feelings of another people.

Languages also have been considered capable of serving as a basis for the classification of the human race. Their importance has been largely discussed, and counts numerous warm partisans.[342] At their head we may perhaps mention Latham, who wishes the ancient history of mankind to be studied by languages,[343] and agreeing in Prichard’s ideas about the production of intermediary hybrid races, he only sees this method of reading the history of the past, and he is quite naturally led to language, which seems to him to offer better conditions of resistance[344] than physical characteristics.

It is true that philology, applied to anthropological research, is of immense assistance to it; it can give us powerful inductions on the history of the past, and on the origin of the present human species. But even these, solutions agree very well with the theory of gradual evolution, and with the corollary of this theory, namely, that man has not always possessed the faculty of speech.[345] Philologists tell us, for instance, that two sister tribes may have been able, at some past time, to create on each side of a mountain two different idioms, which may produce in their turn two families of languages absolutely irreducible one from the other. This is what would take place, according to M. Renan, when the sons of the same parents, separating on the sides of the Imäus, became the double branch from whence have sprung the Semites on one side, and the Aryas on the other. This would be the explanation of the fact so embarrassing for anthropologists, that physical characteristics are sensibly identical among the Semites and Europeans, whilst these races are as distinct as possible in the matter of language. Now, we may even go further, and infer from these facts that the common species from whence the Semites, on the one hand, and the Aryas, on the other, are descended, did not yet know how to speak.