Again, the Jewish race, scattered for more than eighteen centuries in the most different climates, is everywhere the same now as it was in Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs.
The period of positive observations dates thus, from more than forty centuries and not from three or four.[82]
Having no longer any hope to prove by direct demonstrations that the distinctive characters of human races are transformations of one primitive type, the monogenists sought for indirect proofs. They believed to have found them in this fact, or rather assertion, that there is always a certain relation between the characters of human races and the media in which they exist. On close examination this assertion is found to be without any foundation. On studying one by one the principal ethnological characters and their distribution on the surface of the globe, it has been shown that there is no relation between these different characters and the climatic and hygienic conditions.
The monogenists then resorted to an argumentation still more indirect. They advanced that in the whole genus homo there existed a fund of common ideas, creeds, knowledge, and language, attesting the common origin of all human beings. It might be objected that this argument is without any value whatever; considering that indirect communications between peoples of different origin might have passed to each other words, usages, and ideas. But a profound study of the question has shown that there are certain peoples who have absolutely no notion of God or soul, whose languages have no relation whatever to any, who are altogether anti-social, and who differ from the Caucasians more by the intellectual and moral capacities than by their physical characters.
There was even no necessity to insist upon the difficulty, or rather geographical impossibility of the dispersion of so many races proceeding from a common origin, nor to remark that before the remote and the almost recent migrations of Europeans, each natural group of human races occupied upon our planet a region characterised by a special fauna; that no American animal was found either in Australia nor in the ancient continent, and where men of a new type were discovered, there were only found animals belonging to species, even to genera, and sometimes to zoological orders, without analogues in other regions of the globe.
And whilst it was thus simple to suppose that there were several faci of the creation of man, as well as of other beings; and whilst this doctrine, so conformable to all the data furnished by natural science, removed all geographical objections, explaining thus all the analogies and differences of human types, and the repartition of each group; whilst, in one word, it exactly accounted for all the known facts, the opposite doctrine moved in a circle of contradictory suppositions superimposed by hypotheses; theories founded upon a small number of facts upset by other unexpected facts; imaginary influences refuted by observation; anti-historical legends dispelled by historical monuments; lame explanations destroyed by physiology; obscure sophisms refuted by logic; and all this to demonstrate, not exactly that all races descend from the same pair, but that, strictly speaking, such is not altogether impossible.
Whence have the monogenists derived the requisite perseverance and courage to impose upon their reason such continuous restraint, and to resist the testimonies of observation, science, and history?
On analysing their system, we find at every moment two fundamental axioms which serve them as articles of faith, and the evidence of which appears to them sufficient to surmount all other objections.
These two axioms have served as the premises of an apparently irresistible syllogism.
1. All animals, capable of producing an eugenesic progeny, are of the same species.