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.