The avowal which terminates this passage, much diminishes its importance. M. Jacquinot, not having sojourned long in the various countries he visited, was only able to collect superficial observations in regard to a question which requires long and minute researches. But Mr. Nott, one of the most eminent anthropologists of America, was in a better condition to study this subject.
Living in a country where the Caucasian and Ethiopian races are much mixed, and enabled by his profession as a physician to make his observations on a great number of individuals, he arrived at conclusions similar to those of M. Jacquinot. His first essay on hybridity appeared in 1842. It was but a short paper, which attracted but little notice, and which we have not been able to consult, no copy of it being in the Paris library. M. Jacquinot, whose work appeared in 1846, had certainly no knowledge of this essay, his observations having been made in 1836-40, before M. Nott had published his own. We are not, however, engaged here to discuss the question of priority, we state merely the fact that two distinguished observers studying the same subject, unknown to each other, arrived at the same conclusions relating to the sterility of Mulattoes.
In his essay of 1812, Dr. Nott maintained the following propositions, which we extract from a subsequent publication.[27]
1. That Mulattoes are the shortest lived of any class of the human race.
2. That Mulattoes are intermediate in intelligence between the blacks and the whites.
3. That they are less capable of undergoing fatigue and hardships than either the blacks or whites.
4. That the Mulatto-women are peculiarly delicate, and subject to a variety of chronic diseases. That they are bad breeders, bad nurses, liable to abortions, and that their children generally die young.
5. That when Mulattoes intermarry, they are less prolific than when crossed on the parent stock.
6. That when a Negro man married a white woman, the offspring partook more largely of the Negro type than when the reverse connection had effect.