"The rapidity with which these mongrel races cross and multiply is really remarkable. It is scarcely three centuries—hardly twelve generations—since Europeans penetrated into different parts of the world. It is estimated that already the number of mongrels resulting from the crossing of whites with natives, is a seventieth of the whole population of the globe. Experience is indisputable, if we even deny modern science, or at least, wish to make man an exception to all living and organized beings. We must admit that all men form but one species, composed of a certain number of different races; consequently, all men can only be considered as having descended from one primitive pair.
"We arrive at this conclusion in despite of all kinds of dogmatical, theological, philosophical, and metaphysical considerations. Observation and experience alone, applied to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, in a word, science, conducts us to the conclusion, there exists but one species of man.
"This result, I do not fear to say, is of great and serious importance; for it creates in our minds an idea of the universal fraternity of science and reason, the only schools that many persons recognize at this present time.
"I hope that my demonstrations will have convinced you; meanwhile, I am not ignorant, and you all know, that anthropologists differ. There are among my contemporaries a number of men, even of great merit, who believe in the plurality of the human species. You may possibly come into contact with them. Listen attentively, then, to the reasons they will urge to make you see with their eyes. You will find that their reasonings all tend to prove that there is too great a difference between the negro and the white for them to be of the same species. In reply, state that between the black and the white spaniel, the lap-dog and the mastiff, there exist greater differences than exist between the European and the African. Yet these animals are all dogs. They may argue, perhaps, that man, whatever may have been his characteristics, could not have generated both blacks and whites. Then ask why the wild turkey, whose origin, and that of its ancestors, we are acquainted with, and the wild rabbit, which we find everywhere, could have generated all our domestic races?
"We cannot, I repeat, explain perfectly the how and the wherefore; but what we know is, that the fact exists, and we shall find a general explanation in all states of existence—in all conditions of people.
"It is not, then, surprising that man presents, in the different groups, the differences herein depicted; man who trod the earth long before the turkey and the rabbit; man, who for centuries has existed upon the surface of the globe, submitting to the most diverse and opposite conditions of existence, multiplying again the causes of those modifications by his manners and habits, by his ways of living, by more or less care in his own preservation; man, finding himself in more marked and varied conditions than those sustained by the animals we have quoted. If anything surprises us, it is that the distinctions are not more considerable.
"In turn, ask the polygenists—as those savans are called who believe in the multiplicity of the human species—how it is that when the white man locates in any country, from the antipodes, if you will, or from America or Polynesia—that if he unites with the natives, who differ the most completely from him, these unions are fruitful, and that, above all, there remains traces of this alliance in producing a mongrel race?
"If you press the question more closely, you will find them denying the truth of species; by so doing, placing themselves in contradiction with all naturalists, botanists, or zoologists, without exception; consequently, with all the eminent minds who have followed in the wake of Buffon, Tournefort, Jussieu, Cuvier, and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, who made the animal and vegetable kingdoms their study, without discussion, or dreaming of its connection with man. In agitating these doctrines, polygenists place themselves in opposition to the most firmly established science. You will hear them declare that man, above all, is an exception; that he is guided by laws peculiar to himself; and that arguments deduced from the study of animals and plants, are not applicable to him. Then reply that, in the name of all the natural sciences, they are certainly in error, and that it is an impossibility that a living and organized being can escape the laws of organization and of life, having a body fortified against the laws that govern inorganic matter; that man, to be living and organized, obeys, under this title, all general laws, and those of intersection like all the others. The conclusion that we have attained is, then, legitimate, and the nature of the arguments employed to combat them, is a proof the more in its favor.