[143] Indian Migrations, p. 22.
[144] Life and Growth of Language, p. 261.
[145] Lectures on the Science of Language, 2nd series, p. 162.
[146] Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, Introduction.
[147] See p. 110.

VII
HYBRIDITY AND HEREDITY

Four centuries have now completed their course since the discovery of America revealed to Europe an indigenous people, distinct in many respects from all the races of the Old World. There, as in the older historic areas, man is indeed seen in various stages: from the rudest condition of savage life, without any knowledge of metallurgy, and subsisting solely by the chase, to the comparatively civilised nations of Mexico, Central America, and Peru, familiar with some of the most important arts, skilled in agriculture, and with a system of writing embodying the essential germs of intellectual progress.

The western hemisphere, which was the arena of such ethnical development, had lain, for unnumbered centuries, apart from Asia and Europe; and so its various nationalities and races were left to work out their own destinies, and to develop in their own way whatever inherent capacities for progress pertained to them. But this done, it was abruptly brought into intimate relations with Europe by the maritime discoveries which marked the closing years of the fifteenth century.

From that date a constant transfer of races from the Old to the New World has been taking place, alike by voluntary and enforced migration; with results involving a series of undesigned yet exhaustive ethnological experiments carried out on the grandest scale. There alike has been tested to what extent the European and the African are affected by migration to new regions, and by admixture with diverse races. There can now be witnessed the results of a transference, for upwards of three centuries, of indigenous populations of the Old World to a continent where they have been subjected to many novel geographical, climatic, and social influences. There, too, has taken place, on a scale without any parallel elsewhere, an intimate and prolonged intermixture of some of the most highly cultured races of Europe with purely savage tribes, under circumstances which have tended to place them, for the time being, on an equality as hunters, trappers, or explorers of their vast forest and prairie wilds.

The whole question of heredity, its phenomena and results, is now in process of review under the novel phases that affect anthropology; and in this view the illustrations which the New World supplies in reference to hybridity and absorption have a distinctive value. The anthropologist recognises various elements marking diversity of race in stature, colour, proportion of limbs, conformation of skull, colour and other characteristics of eye and hair. He also notes no less distinctively the diverse intellectual and moral aptitudes. Noticeable as are the diversities of national type in Europe, the range of variation is trifling when compared with the conditions under which the White, Red, and Black races have met and intermingled in the West Indies and in North and South America. The cultured and civilised races of Europe have there united their blood with the African negro and the native Indian savage; and both admixtures have been carried out on so great a scale as to furnish indisputable data for determining the question how far the half-breed is a mean between the two parents; or if there is any inevitable preponderance of one of them, with a tendency to revert to one or the other type. The intermarriage of fair and dark races of the Old World has gone on throughout the whole historic period, with apparently resultant intermediate types. The Iberians and “black Celts” of Western Europe, and the dark brunettes of the Mediterranean shores, stand out in marked contrast to the blondes of the Baltic shores. Whatever may be said of other diversities of race, Professor Huxley is led to the opinion that the Melanochroi, or dark whites, are not a distinct group, but the metis resultant from just such a mixture of his “Australioids” and his “Xanthocroi,” as has been going on for centuries on the American continent between the blondes of Europe and the native olive-skinned American, and between both of them and the dark African race.