St. Augustine, in his thirty-third sermon, addressed "To his Brothers in the Desert," tell things as extraordinary as Jerome. "I was already bishop of Hippo, when I went into Ethiopia with some servants of Christ, there to preach the gospel. In this country we saw many men and women without heads, who had two great eyes in their breasts. In countries still more southerly, we saw a people who had but one eye in their foreheads," etc.
Apparently, Augustine and Jerome then spoke "with economy"; they augmented the works of creation to raise greater admiration of the works of God. They sought to astonish men by fables, to render them more submissive to the yoke of faith.
We can be very good Christians without believing in centaurs, men without heads, or with only one eye, one leg, etc. But can we doubt that the interior structure of a negro may be different to that of a white, since the mucous netted membrane beneath the skin is white in the one, and black in the other? I have already told you so, but you are deaf.
The Albinos and the Darians—the first originally of Africa, and the second of the middle of America—are as different from us as from the negroes. There are yellow, red, and gray races. We have already seen that all the Americans are without beards or hair on their bodies, except the head and eyebrows. All are equally men, but only as a fir, an oak, and a pear tree are equally trees; the pear tree comes not from the fir, nor the fir from the oak.
But whence comes it, that in the midst of the Pacific Ocean, in an island named Otaheite, the men are bearded? It is to ask why we are so, while the Peruvians, Mexicans, and Canadians are not. It is to ask, why apes have tails, and why nature has refused us an ornament which, at least among us, is an extreme rarity.
The inclinations and characters of men differ as much as their climates and governments. It has never been possible to compose a regiment of Laplanders and Samoyeds, whilst the Siberians, their neighbors, become intrepid soldiers.
Neither can you make good grenadiers of a poor Darian or an Albino. It is not because they have partridge eyes, or that their hair and eyebrows are like the finest and whitest silk; but it is because their bodies, and consequently their courage, partake of the most extreme weakness. There is none but a blind man, and even an obstinate blind man, who can deny the existence of all these different species. It is as great and remarkable as that of apes.
That All Races Of Men Have Constantly Lived In Society.
All the men whom we have discovered in the most uncultivated and frightful countries herd together like beavers, ants, bees, and several other species of animals.
We have never seen countries in which they lived separate; or in which the male only joined with the female by chance, and abandoned her the moment after in disgust; or in which the mother estranged herself from her children, after having brought them up; or in which human beings lived without family and society. Some poor jesters have abused their understandings so far as to hazard the astonishing paradox, that man is originally created to live alone, and that it is society which has depraved his nature. They might as well say that herrings were created to swim alone in the sea; and that it is by an excess of corruption, that they pass in a troop from the Frozen Ocean to our shores; that formerly cranes flew in the air singly, and that, by a violation of their natural instinct, they have subsequently chosen to travel in company.