II

OF THE DIFFERENT RACES OF MEN

WHAT IS the most interesting to us, is the sensible difference in the species of men, who inhabit the four known quarters of the world.

None but the blind can doubt that the whites, the negroes, the Albinoes, the Hottentots, the Laplanders, the Chinese, the Americans, are races entirely different.

No curious traveller ever passed through Leyden, without seeing part of the reticulum mucosum of a negro dissected by the celebrated Ruish. The remainder of this membrane is in the cabinet of curiosities at Petersburg. This membrane is black, and communicates to negroes that inherent blackness, which they do not lose, but in such disorders as may destroy this texture, and allow the grease to issue from its cells, and form white spots under the skin.

Their round eyes, squat noses, and invariable thick lips, the different configuration of their ears, their woolly heads, and the measure of their intellects, make a prodigious difference between them and other species of men; and what demonstrates, that they are not indebted for this difference to their climates, is that negro men and women, being transported into the coldest countries, constantly produce animals of their own species; and that mulattoes are only a bastard race of black men and white women, or white men and black women, as asses, specifically different from horses, produce mules by copulating with mares.

The Albinoes are, indeed, a very small and scarce nation; they inhabit the center of Africa. Their weakness does not allow them to make excursions far from the caverns which they inhabit; the negroes, nevertheless, catch some of them at times, and these we purchase of them as curiosities. I have seen two of them, a thousand other Europeans have seen some. To say that they are dwarf negroes, whose skin has been blanched by a kind of leprosy, is like saying that the blacks themselves are whites blackened by the leprosy. An Albino no more resembles a Guinea negro, than he does an Englishman or a Spaniard. Their whiteness is not like ours, it does not appear like flesh, it has no mixture of white and brown; it is the color of linen, or rather of bleached wax; their hair and eye-brows are like the finest and softest silk; their eyes have no sort of similitude with those of other men, but they come very near partridge’s eyes. Their shape resembles that of the Laplanders, but their head that of no other nation whatever; as their hair, their eyes, their ears, are all different, and they have nothing that seems to belong to man but the stature of their bodies, with the faculty of speaking and thinking, but in a degree very different from ours.

The apron, which nature has given to the Caffres, and whose flabby and lank skin falls from their navel half way down their thighs; the black breasts of the Samoiedes women, the beard of the males of our continent, and the beardless chins of the Americans, are such striking distinctions, that it is scarce possible to imagine that they are not each of them of different races.

But now, if it should be asked, from whence came the Americans, it should be asked from whence came the inhabitants of the Terra Australis; and it has been already answered, that the same providence which placed men in Norway, planted some also in America and under the antarctic circle, in the same manner as it planted trees and made grass to grow there.

Several of the learned have surmised, that some races of men, or animals approximating to men, have perished: the Albinoes are so few in number, so weak, and so ill used by the negroes, that there is reason to apprehend this species will not long subsist.

Satyrs are mentioned by all the ancient writers. I do not see why their existence should be impossible: monsters brought forth by women are still stifled in Calabria. It is not improbable that in hot countries, monkeys may have enslaved girls. Herodotus in his second book, says, that in his Voyage into Egypt, there was a woman in the province of Mendes, who publicly copulated with a he-goat; and he calls all Egypt to witness the truth of it. It is forbidden in Leviticus, chapter seventeen to commit abominations with he and she-goats. These copulations must then have been common, and till such time as we are better informed, it is to be presumed that a monstrous species must have arisen from these abominable amours; but if such did exist, they could have no influence over the human kind; and like the mules, who do not engender, they could not interrupt the course of nature in the other races.

With respect to the duration of the life of man (if you abstract that line of Adam’s descendants, consecrated by the Jewish books) it is probable that all the races of man have enjoyed a life nearly as short as our own; as animals, trees and all productions of nature, have ever had the same duration.

But it should be observed, that commerce not having always introduced among mankind the productions and disorders of other climates, and men being more robust and laborious in the simplicity of a country life, for which they are born, they must have enjoyed a more equal health, and a life somewhat longer than in effeminacy, or in the unhealthy works of great cities; that is to say, that if in Constantinople, Paris, or London, one man in 20,000 attains the age of an hundred years, it is probable that twenty men in twenty years arrived formerly at that age. This is seen in several parts of America, where mankind have preserved a pure state of nature.

The plague and the small pox, which the Arabian caravans communicated in a course of years to the people of Asia and Europe, were for a long time unknown. Thus mankind in Asia and the fine climates of Europe multiplied more easily than elsewhere. Accidental disorders, and some wounds were not, indeed, cured, as they are at present; but the advantage of never being afflicted with the plague or smallpox, compensated all the dangers attendant on our nature; so that, every thing considered, it is to be believed that human kind formerly enjoyed in the favorable climates a more healthy and happy life, than since the foundation of great empires.