[356] See Ethnographic Tableau (Indigenous Races of the Earth, London, 1857).
[357] We may quote, as types of genus, two paintings, incomparable in an anthropological point of view, Portrait d’un Nègre; Portrait d’un Oriental, by Herschop (Berlin Museum, Nos. 825 and 827).
[358] M. Flourens, in saying that Buffon collected the accounts of different travellers in order to write his Histoire des Races, adds, “Whatever they have only seen with the eyes of their body, he sees with the eyes of his mind, and by that means alone he sees better than they can; each of them has seen merely some scattered characteristics,—Buffon sees everything; he links together whatever they may have separated, and separates whatever they have confounded.”—Histoire des Idées de Buffon, p. 167.
[359] “Boni viri nullam oportet esse causam præter veritatem.”
[360] [Yes, but the difficulty is to determine if it is true. We cannot receive anything as true merely because a savant says it is so. We must go on enquiring in a proper spirit; but we must not put inquiry after truth in the same category with scepticism,—“that cheerlessness of soul to which certainty respecting anything and everything here on earth seems unattainable.” This is the age for seeking after truth; but in how many different ways do men endeavour to attain to it! We must search the past carefully in all its scientific and natural facts, and as Longfellow beautifully says,—
“Nor deem the irrevocable past,
As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising on its wrecks, at last
To something nobler we attain.”
This is the true aim of all inquiry.—Editor.]