Critiques and Addresses

by Thomas Henry Huxley

But if this be true, it is somewhat startling to reflect upon the prodigious changes which have taken place in the physical geography of this planet since man has been an occupant of it.

During that period the greater part of the British islands, of Central Europe, of Northern Asia, have been submerged beneath the sea and raised up again. So has the great desert of Sahara, which occupies the major part of Northern Africa. The Caspian and the Aral seas have been one, and their united waters have probably communicated with both the Arctic and the Mediterranean oceans. The greater part of North America has been under water, and has emerged. It is highly probable that a large part of the Malayan Archipelago has sunk, and its primitive continuity with Asia has been destroyed. Over the great Polynesian area subsidence has taken place to the extent of many thousands of feet—subsidence of so vast a character, in fact, that if a continent like Asia had once occupied the area of the Pacific, the peaks of its mountains would now show not more numerous than the islands of the Polynesian Archipelago.

What lands may have been thickly populated for untold ages, and subsequently have disappeared and left no sign above the waters, it is of course impossible for us to say; but unless we are to make the wholly unjustifiable assumption that no dry land rose elsewhere when our present dry land sank, there must be half-a-dozen Atlantises beneath the waves of the various oceans of the world. But if the regions which have undergone these slow and gradual, but immense alterations, were wholly or in part inhabited before the changes I have indicated began—and it is more probable that they were, than that they were not—what a wonderfully efficient "Emigration Board" must have been at work all over the world long before canoes, or even rafts, were invented; and before men were impelled to wander by any desire nobler or stronger than hunger. And as these rude and primitive families were thrust, in the course of long series of generations, from land to land, impelled by encroachments of sea or of marsh, or by severity of summer heat or winter cold, to change their positions, what opportunities must have been offered for the play of natural selection, in preserving one family variation and destroying another!

Suppose, for example, that some families of a horde which had reached a land charged with the seeds of yellow fever, varied in the direction of woolliness of hair and darkness of skin. Then, if it be true that these physical characters are accompanied by comparative or absolute exemptions from that scourge, the inevitable tendency would be to the preservation and multiplication of the darker and woollier families, and the elimination of the whiter and smoother-haired. In fact, by the operation of causes precisely similar to those which, in the famous instance cited by Mr. Darwin, have given rise to a race of black pigs in the forests of Louisiana, a negro stock would eventually people the region.

Again, how often, by such physical changes, must a stock have been isolated from all others for innumerable generations, and have found ample time for the hereditary hardening of its special peculiarities into the enduring characters of a persistent modification.

Nor, if it be true that the physiological difference of species may be produced by variation and natural selection, as Mr. Darwin supposes, would it be at all astonishing if, in some of these separated stocks, the process of differentiation should have gone so far as to give rise to the phenomena of hybridity. In the face of the overwhelming evidence in favour of the unity of the origin of mankind afforded by anatomical considerations, satisfactory proof of the existence of any degree of sterility in the unions of members of two of the "persistent modifications" of mankind, might well be appealed to by Mr. Darwin as crucial evidence of the truth of his views regarding the origin of species in general.

VIII.

ON SOME FIXED POINTS IN BRITISH ETHNOLOGY.

In view of the many discussions to which the complicated problems offered by the ethnology of the British Islands have given rise, it may be useful to attempt to pick out, from amidst the confused masses of assertion and of inference, those propositions which appear to rest upon a secure foundation, and to state the evidence by which they are supported. Such is the purpose of the present paper.

Some of these well-based propositions relate to the physical characters of the people of Britain and their neighbours; while others concern the languages which they spoke. I shall deal, in the first place, with the physical questions.