Critiques and Addresses by Thomas Henry Huxley

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But those who are disposed to believe in this doctrine should study
the evidence brought forward in its support by M. Broca, its latest
and ablest advocate, and compare this evidence with that which the
botanists, as represented by a Gaertner, or by a Darwin, think it
indispensable to obtain before they will admit the infertility of
crosses between two allied kinds of plants. They will then, I think,
be satisfied that the doctrine in question rests upon a very unsafe
foundation; that the facts adduced in its support are capable of many
other interpretations; and, indeed, that from the very nature of
the case, demonstrative evidence one way or the other is almost
unattainable. _A priori_, I should be disposed to expect a certain
amount of infertility between some of the extreme modifications of
mankind; and still more between the offsprings of their intermixture.
_A posteriori_, I cannot discover any satisfactory proof that such
infertility exists.

From the facts of ethnology I now turn to the theories and
speculations of ethnologists, which have been devised to explain
these facts, and to furnish satisfactory answers to the inquiry--what
conditions have determined the existence of the persistent
modifications of mankind, and have caused their distribution to be
what it is?

These speculations may be grouped under three heads: firstly, the
Monogenist hypotheses; secondly, those of the Polygenists; and
thirdly, that which would result from a simple application of
Darwinian principles to mankind.

According to the Monogenists, all mankind have sprung from a single
pair, whose multitudinous progeny spread themselves over the world,
such as it now is, and became modified into the forms we meet with in
the various regions of the earth, by the effect of the climatal and
other conditions to which they were subjected.

The advocates of this hypothesis are divisible into several schools.
There are those who represent the most numerous, respectable,
and would-be orthodox of the public, and are what may be called
"Adamites," pure and simple. They believe that Adam was made out of
earth somewhere in Asia, about six thousand years ago; that Eve was
modelled from one of his ribs; and that the progeny of these two
having been reduced to the eight persons who were landed on the summit
of Mount Ararat after an universal deluge, all the nations of the
earth have proceeded from these last, have migrated to their present
localities, and have become converted into Negroes, Australians,
Mongolians, &c., within that time. Five-sixths of the public are
taught this Adamitic Monogenism, as if it were an established truth,
and believe it. I do not; and I am not acquainted with any man of
science, or duly instructed person, who does.

A second school of monogenists, not worthy of much attention, attempts
to hold a place midway between the Adamites and a third division, who
take up a purely scientific position, and require to be dealt with
accordingly. This third division, in fact, numbers in its ranks
Linnaeus, Buffon, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Prichard, and many distinguished
living ethnologists.

These "Rational Monogenists," or, at any rate, the more modern among
them, hold, firstly, that the present condition of the earth has
existed for untold ages; secondly, that, at a remote period, beyond
the ken of Archbishop Usher, man was created, somewhere between the
Caucasus and the Hindoo Koosh; thirdly, that he might have migrated
thence to all parts of the inhabited world, seeing that none of them
are unattainable from some other inhabited part, by men provided with
only such means of transport as savages are known to possess and
must have invented; fourthly, that the operation of the existing
diversities of climate and other conditions upon people so migrating,
is sufficient to account for all the diversities of mankind.

Of the truth of the first of these propositions no competent judge now
entertains any doubt. The second is more open to discussion, for in
these latter days many question the special creation of man: and even
if his special creation be granted, there is not a shadow of a reason
why he should have been created in Asia rather than anywhere else.
Of all the odd myths that have arisen in the scientific world, the
"Caucasian mystery," invented quite innocently by Blumenbach, is the
oddest. A Georgian woman's skull was the handsomest in his collection.
Hence it became his model exemplar of human skulls, from which all
others might be regarded as deviations; and out of this, by some
strange intellectual hocus-pocus, grew up the notion that the
Caucasian man is the prototypic "Adamic" man, and his country the
primitive centre of our kind. Perhaps the most curious thing of all
is, that the said Georgian skull, after all, is not a skull of average
form, but distinctly belongs to the brachycephalic group.

With the third proposition I am quite disposed to agree, though
it must be recollected that it is one thing to allow that a given
migration is possible, and another to admit there is good reason to
believe it has really taken place.

But I can find no sufficient ground for accepting the fourth
proposition; and I doubt if it would ever have obtained its general
currency except for the circumstance that fair Europeans are very
readily tanned and embrowned by the sun. But I am not aware that there
is a particle of proof that the cutaneous change thus effected can
become hereditary, any more than that the enlarged livers, which
plague our countrymen in India, can be transmitted;--while there is
very strong evidence to the contrary. Not only, in fact, are there
such cases as those of the English families in Barbadoes, who have
remained for six generations unaltered in complexion, but which are
open to the objection that they may have received infusions of
fresh European blood; but there is the broad fact, that not a single
indigenous Negro exists either in the great alluvial plains of
tropical South America, or in the exposed islands of the Polynesian
Archipelago, or among the populations of equatorial Borneo or Sumatra.
No satisfactory explanation of these obvious difficulties has been
offered by the advocates of the direct influence of conditions. And as
for the more important modifications observed in the structure of the
brain, and in the form of the skull, no one has ever pretended to show
in what way they can be effected directly by climate.

It is here, in fact, that the strength of the Polygenists, or those
who maintain that men primitively arose, not from one, but from many
stocks, lies. Show us, they say to the Monogenists, a single case in
which the characters of a human stock have been essentially modified
without its being demonstrable, or, at least, highly probable, that
there has been intermixture of blood with some foreign stock. Bring
forward any instance in which a part of the world, formerly inhabited
by one stock, is now the dwelling-place of another, and we will prove
the change to be the result of migration, or of intermixture, and not
of modification of character by climatic influences. Finally, prove
to us that the evidence in favour of the specific distinctness of many
animals, admitted to be distinct species by all zoologists, is a whit
better than that upon which we maintain the specific distinctness of
men.

If presenting unanswerable objections to your adversary were the same
thing as proving your own case, the Polygenists would be in a fair way
towards victory; but, unfortunately, as I have already observed, they
have as yet completely failed to adduce satisfactory positive proof
of the specific diversity of mankind. Like the Monogenists, the
Polygenists are of several sects; some imagine that their assumed
species of mankind were created where we find them--the African in
Africa, and the Australian in Australia, along with the other animals
of their distributional province; others conceive that each species of
man has resulted from the modification of some antecedent species of
ape--the American from the broad-nosed Simians of the New World, the
African from the Troglodytic stock, the Mongolian from the Orangs.

The first hypothesis is hardly likely to win much favour. The whole
tendency of modern science is to thrust the origination of things
further and further into the background; and the chief philosophical
objection to Adam being, not his oneness, but the hypothesis of his
special creation; the multiplication of that objection tenfold is,
whatever it may look, an increase, instead of a diminution, of the
difficulties of the case. And, as to the second alternative, it may
safely be affirmed that, even if the differences between men are
specific, they are so small, that the assumption of more than one
primitive stock for all is altogether superfluous. Surely no one can
now be found to assert that any two stocks of mankind differ as much
as a chimpanzee and an orang do; still less that they are as unlike as
either of these is to any New World Simian!

Lastly, the granting of the Polygenist premises does not, in the
slightest degree, necessitate the Polygenist conclusion. Admit that
Negroes and Australians, Negritos and Mongols are distinct species,
or distinct genera, if you will, and you may yet, with perfect
consistency, be the strictest of Monogenists, and even believe in Adam
and Eve as the primaeval parents of all mankind.

It is to Mr. Darwin we owe this discovery: it is he who, coming
forward in the guise of an eclectic philosopher, presents his doctrine
as the key to ethnology, and as reconciling and combining all that is
good in the Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools.

It is true that Mr. Darwin has not, in so many words, applied his
views to ethnology; but even he who "runs and reads" the "Origin of
Species" can hardly fail to do so; and, furthermore, Mr. Wallace and
M. Pouchet have recently treated of ethnological questions from this
point of view. Let me, in conclusion, add my own contribution to the
same store.

I assume Man to have arisen in the manner which I have discussed
elsewhere, and probably, though by no means necessarily, in one
locality. Whether he arose singly, or a number of examples appeared
contemporaneously, is also an open question for the believer in the
production of species by the gradual modification of pre-existing
ones. At what epoch of the world's history this took place, again, we
have no evidence whatever. It may have been in the older tertiary,
or earlier, but what is most important to remember is, that the
discoveries of late years have proved that man inhabited Western
Europe, at any rate, before the occurrence of those great physical
changes which have given Europe its present aspect. And as the same
evidence shows that man was the contemporary of animals which are now
extinct, it is not too much to assume that his existence dates back
at least as far as that of our present Fauna and Flora, or before the
epoch of the drift.

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.

I. _Eighteen hundred years ago the population of Britain comprised
people of two types of complexion--the one fair, and the other dark.
The dark people resembled the Aquitani and the Iberians; the fair
people were like the Belgic Gauls._

The chief direct evidence of the truth of this proposition is the
well-known passage of Tacitus:--

"Ceterum Britanniam qui mortales initio coluerint, indigenae
an advecti, ut inter barbaros, parum compertum. Habitus
corporum varii: atque ex eo argumenta: nam rutilae Caledoniam
habitantium comae, magni artus Germanicam originem asseverant.
Silurum colorati vultus et torti plerumque crines, et posita
contra Hispaniam, Iberos veteres trajecisse, easque sedes
occupasse, fidem faciunt. Proximi Gallis et similes sunt; seu
durante originis vi, seu procurrentibus in diversa terris,
positio coeli corporibus habitum dedit. In universum tamen
aestimanti, Gallos vicinum solum occupasse, credibile est;
eorum sacra deprehendas, superstitionum persuasione; sermo
haud multum diversus."[1]

[Footnote 1: Taciti Agricola, c. 11.]

This passage, it will be observed, contains statements as to facts,
and certain conclusions deduced from these facts. The matters of fact
asserted are: firstly, that the inhabitants of Britain exhibit much
diversity in their physical characters; secondly, that the Caledonians
are red-haired and large-limbed, like the Germans; thirdly, that
the Silures have curly hair and dark complexions, like the people of
Spain; fourthly, that the British people nearest Gaul resemble the
"Galli."

Tacitus, therefore, states positively what the Caledonians and Silures
were like; but the interpretation of what he says about the other
Britons must depend upon what we learn from other sources as to the
characters of these "Galli." Here the testimony of "divus Julius"
comes in with great force and appropriateness. Caesar writes:--

"Britanniae pars interior ab iis incolitur, quos natos in
insula ipsi memoria proditum dicunt: marituma pars ab iis,
qui predae ac belli inferendi causa ex Belgio transierant; qui
omnes fere iis nominibus civitatum appellantur quibus orti ex
civitatibus eo pervenerunt, et bello inlato ibi permanserunt
atque agros colere coeperunt."[1]

[Footnote 1: De Bello Gallico, v. 12.]

From these passages it is obvious that in the opinion of Caesar
and Tacitus, the southern Britons resembled the northern Gauls, and
especially the Belgae; and the evidence of Strabo is decisive as to
the characters in which the two people resembled one another: "The men
(of Britain) are taller than the Kelts, with hair less yellow; they
are slighter in their persons."[1]

[Footnote 1: "The Geography of Strabo." Translated by Hamilton and
Falconer; v. 5.]

The evidence adduced appears to leave no reasonable ground for
doubting that, at the time of the Roman conquest, Britain contained
people of two types, the one dark and the other fair complexioned, and
that there was a certain difference between the latter in the north
and in the south of Britain: the northern folk being, in the judgment
of Tacitus, or, more properly, according to the information he had
received from Agricola and others, more similar to the Germans than
the latter. As to the distribution of these stocks, all that is clear
is, that the dark people were predominant in certain parts of the west
of the southern half of Britain, while the fair stock appears to have
furnished the chief elements of the population elsewhere.

No ancient writer troubled himself with measuring skulls, and
therefore there is no direct evidence as to the cranial characters
of the fair and the dark stocks. The indirect evidence is not very
satisfactory. The tumuli of Britain of pre-Roman date have yielded two
extremely different forms of skull, the one broad and the other long;
and the same variety has been observed in the skulls of the ancient
Gauls[1]. The suggestion is obvious that the one form of skull may
have been associated with the fair, and the other with the dark,
complexion. But any conclusion of this kind is at once checked by the
reflection that the extremes of long and short-headedness are to be
met with among the fair inhabitants of Germany and of Scandinavia
at the present day--the south-western Germans and the Swiss being
markedly broad-headed, while the Scandinavians are as predominantly
long-headed.

[Footnote 1: See Dr. Thurnam "On the Two principal Forms of Ancient
British and Gaulish Skulls."]

What the natives of Ireland were like at the time of the Roman
conquest of Britain, and for centuries afterwards, we have no certain
knowledge; but the earliest trustworthy records prove the existence,
side by side with one another, of a fair and a dark stock, in Ireland
as in Britain. The long form of skull is predominant among the
ancient, as among modern, Irish.

II. _The people termed Gauls, and those called Germans, by the Romans,
did not differ in any important physical character._

The terms in which the ancient writers describe both Gauls and Germans
are identical. They are always tall people, with massive limbs, fair
skins, fierce blue eyes, and hair the colour of which ranges from
red to yellow. Zeuss, the great authority on these matters, affirms
broadly that no distinction in bodily feature is to be found between
the Gauls, the Germans, and the Wends, so far as their characters are
recorded by the old historians; and he proves his case by citations
from a cloud of witnesses.

An attempt has been made to show that the colour of the hair of the
Gauls must have differed very much from that which obtained among the
Germans, on the strength of the story told by Suetonius (Caligula, 4),
that Caligula tried to pass off Gauls for Germans by picking out the
tallest, and making them "rutilare et summittere comam."

The Baron de Belloguet remarks upon this passage:--

"It was in the very north of Gaul, and near the sea, that
Caligula got up this military comedy. And the fact proves
that the Belgae were already sensibly different from their
ancestors, whom Strabo had found almost identical with their
_brothers_ on the other side of the Rhine."

But the fact recorded by Suetonius, if fact it be, proves nothing;
for the Germans themselves were in the habit of reddening their hair.
Ammianus Marcellinus[1] tells how, in the year 367 A.D., the Roman
commander, Jovinus, surprised a body of Alemanni near the town now
called Charpeigne, in the valley of the Moselle; and how the Roman
soldiers, as, concealed by the thick wood, they stole upon their
unsuspecting enemies, saw that some were bathing and others "comas
rutilantes ex more." More than two centuries earlier Pliny gives
indirect evidence to the same effect when he says of soap:--

[Footnote 1: Res Gestae, xxvii.]

"Galliarum hoc inventum rutilandis capillis ... apud Germanos
majore in usu viris quam foeminis."[1]

[Footnote 1: Historia Naturalis, xxviii. 51.]

Here we have a writer who flourished only a short time after the date
of the Caligula story, telling us that the Gauls invented soap for the
purpose of doing that which, according to Suetonius, Caligula forced
them to do. And, further, the combined and independent testimony of
Pliny and Ammianus assures us that the Germans were as much in the
habit of reddening their hair as the Gauls. As to De Belloguet's
supposition that, even in Caligula's time, the Gauls had become darker
than their ancestors were, it is directly contradicted by Ammianus
Marcellinus, who knew the Gauls well. "Celsioris staturae et candidi
poene Galli sunt onions, et rutili, luminumque torvitate terribiles,"
is his description; and it would fit the Gauls who sacked Rome.

III. _In none of the invasions of Britain which have taken place since
the Roman dominion, has any other type of man been introduced than one
or other of the two which existed during that dominion_.

The North Germans, who effected what is commonly called the Saxon
conquest of Britain, were, most assuredly, a fair, yellow, or
red-haired, blue eyed, long-skulled people. So were the Danes and the
Norsemen who followed them; though it is very possible that the active
slave trade which went on, and the intercourse with Ireland, may have
introduced a certain admixture of the dark stock into both Denmark and
Norway. The Norman conquest brought in new ethnological elements, the
precise value of which cannot be estimated with exactness; but as to
their quality, there can be no question, inasmuch as even the wide
area from which William drew his followers could yield him nothing but
the fair and the dark types of men, already present in Britain. But
whether the Norman settlers, on the whole, strengthened the fair or
the dark element, is a problem, the elements of the solution of which
are not attainable.

I am unable to discover any grounds for believing that a Lapp element
has ever entered into the population of these islands. So far as the
physical evidence goes, it is perfectly consistent with the hypothesis
that the only constituent stocks of that population, now, or at any
other period about which we have evidence, are the dark whites, whom
I have proposed to call "_Melanochroi_" and the fair whites, or
"_Xanthochroi._"

IV. _The Xanthochroi and the Melanochroi of Britain are, speaking
broadly, distributed, at present, as they were in the time of Tacitus;
and their representatives on the continent of Europe have the same
general distribution as at the earliest period of which we have any
record._

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