THE INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE.
Monogenists--starting from unity of origin as a fact, if not proved, at
least accepted and unquestionable,--were necessarily led to discover a
physiological explanation of the profound differences which we find at
the present day among mankind, and which would have led them, according
to monogenists, from one extreme state to the other, or from a medium
state to the two extremes.
Now, it is necessary to remember that every question concerning
influence implies a previous historic notion. We cannot establish that
a modification is not produced in a body (here is humanity), except
by comparing it with itself at two distinct moments of duration, more
or less distant. When a monogenist admits as an origin one uniform
human race, he places a term of comparison in the past, he gives an
historical date more or less definite to this uniform human species.
And it is because religious cosmogonies alone dare, at the present day,
to arrogate to themselves the power of making history dart back to the
commencement of humanity, that we shall always be much troubled by
not seeing a theological influence as the basis of monogenist ideas;
now, they say, however, that they have discovered the trace of this
human uniformity upon which they rely, in order to prove this great
historical fact.
In our own opinion, history is very far from commencing with mankind;
it only goes back two or three ages before the invention of figurative
language,--a more important and difficult language for man than
articulated language, which was discovered long before, and at many
different points. It is _writing_ which makes the Asiatics and the
lost people of Central America better than savages; and if we were
asked for a specific distinction with regard to intelligence between
mankind and animals, we should only be able to find it there. It will
be seen later that we are far from denying the influence of a middle
course; but we maintain that every term of comparison is wanting at the
present day to show that man, since the most distant historic periods,
has ever shown less dissimilarities than now. Most monogenists,
disagreeing about the whole system of modifying causes, agree generally
in acknowledging that climates and hybridity have a decisive creative
influence as regards races of men. These two kinds of influence alone
deserve our consideration. We shall commence by climate, putting on one
side, for the present, the study of the specious question of hybridity,
whose part is so badly understood by those who believe that it creates
varieties, when it can only weaken differences.
An important part in the means of alteration from one race to another
has been given, by Hippocrates, to external influences. He seems
to have been the first to point this out, in his _Treatise on Air,
Water, and Places_.[207] “The form, colour, and manners of nations,”
says Polybius, “depend solely on the diversity of climates.”[208] In
general, the ancients believed in the immediate and sudden influence of
climate, so much so that a stranger, at the end of a few years, would
be completely changed and altered to the type of the inhabitants of the
same place.
In our days, Cabanis alone has dared to go so far as this.[209]
Some monogenists have simply enlarged Grecian theories, and explained
everything by the prolonged duration of the same influences. Others
have supposed that local changes in the atmospheric conditions of the
world, anterior to the actual epoch, were the cause. This is a sort of
progress beyond the preceding hypothesis, in the sense that at least we
must recognise the insufficiency of actually existing causes, in order
to explain the great differences observed at the present day between
men. Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire has agreed with his father upon the
great question of the influence of the surrounding medium; but death
seized him before he could apply these theories to mankind. However,
the high position that his _Histoire Naturelle Générale_ has taken in
science obliges us to pause a moment on the subject of his opinions,
which have, besides, easily triumphed over the ruins of Cuvier’s
school. And if we do not agree with all the doctrines propounded by the
second Geoffroy, we are all the more satisfied, since, differing from
the son, we incline more to the theories of the father.
Isidore Geoffroy believed in a decisive influence of the medium, but
only under certain conditions. He believed that these influences are
limited, as he himself calls it, every time that it relates to anything
beyond the action of man, that is to say, on savage or free animals.
In this case, the action of the _medium_, according to him, would be
confined exclusively to the producing of varieties in form and in the
colour of the skin,[210]--a form we never see varied in the same class
of men; the colour of the skin,--which is sensibly the same among men,
among whom the fair type is itself exceptional, and spread over a very
small portion of the ancient north-west continent.
In every case, Isidore Geoffroy acknowledged that these variations
are sometimes very inconsiderable;[211] and although they have in no
way approached those which separate human races, we may be allowed to
believe that the differences observed among savage species were, in
his eyes, much less important. He has endeavoured, on the contrary, to
compare insignificant differences among free animals with varieties
much more marked, and much clearer than those shown by domestic
animals, and therefore, doubtless, he wished to make a step towards
the fundamental question of anthropology, which was evidently at the
bottom of his thoughts, and which he had for a long time resolved in a
monogenist sense.
But domestic animals have quite special conditions, which do not
allow the assimilation of these varieties with those which have been
simply produced by natural forces. Cuvier[212] had already pointed out
this difference, and rejected all assimilation between them and free
animals. Without taking too much account of the reasons which impelled
him towards such opinions, we believe that upon this point, at least,
he was entirely in the right; as to the rest, Isidore Geoffroy himself
furnishes us with weapons against his own theories. “Since nature,
left to herself,” he says, “does not give us witnesses of the great
changes in the conditions of existence, it is clear that there only
remains one means of seeing such changes, and of deducing therefrom
the effects upon organisation,--it is _to force nature to do what she
would not do voluntarily_.”[213] All the condemnation of this system of
Isidore Geoffroy is contained, in our opinion, in these last words. As
for ourselves, we reject, in the most absolute and formal manner, the
connexion which some have desired to make between man and the domestic
animals. Man is a sociable animal, like many others; but he only
becomes exceptionally a domestic animal when he falls into slavery. The
domestic animal is a being drawn from the normal state, and constrained
by man. He is constrained by nature to obey the influence of his
master alone,--an influence infinitely variable. It resembles itself
no longer; the habit of obedience does not even leave it its will; it
ceases to be a personality, and becomes a mere machine, producing for
the benefit of another person.
Domesticity has certain characteristics of degeneracy; the animal loses
its activity, it becomes less eager, and assimilates itself more; it
becomes almost incapable of subsisting alone; it vegetates; together
with its personality it has lost this resistance to the ambient medium,
which is the necessary characteristic of the species, the condition of
the _nisus formativus_; it modifies itself to everybody’s will. Its
organism may be considered as being in a state of unstable equilibrium,
so that the least influence causes this organism to vary, and with
the least possible delay, to a considerable degree.[214] But when man
ceases for an instant to be attentive in directing these modifications,
when he forgets himself for a moment, nature--always vigilant and ready
to seize upon her rights--destroys all this human edifice, and recalls
the animal to a type which may be called normal, but which is not the
type of the stock, since nature, acting on an organism endowed, as we
have just said, with the wonderful malleability and ductility acquired
by domesticity, immediately and naturally modifies the animal, which is
restored to liberty, by the power of the new medium into which it is
cast.
Nothing of the same sort takes place with mankind. This does not mean,
however, that he cannot also be reduced to a state of domesticity.[215]
Slaves, indeed, are nothing else; and all that is wanting in order to
place them in comparison with animal domesticity, would be the history
of a race of Ilotes, which has always been free from any mixture, and
has continued so during a time equal to that which separates us from
the first conquest of the dog, the sheep, and the ox, upon the high
table-lands of Asia.
Let us, then, leave all comparison[216] between man, free to come, to
go, and to choose his own food,--and domestic animals. Let us return
to those who live free, and say, once for all, that if we stop our
progress with so many details concerning these comparisons, it is
from a kind of respect for the character of certain learned men who
have thus treated anthropological science. We believe very little in
biology, or in demonstrations by _similarities_. Every animal, every
organ, every anatomical element, has its own life, its own laws of
birth, development, nutrition, and reproduction. At the commencement
of science, everything is clear and easy, like the cellular theory,
for instance, in the elements of anatomy; but every day the laws of
life (we might say, the laws of nature) are multiplied and complicated;
every morning the searcher after truth must expect to discover some
phenomenon which will disturb the scientific belief of the night
before. “Every evening,” said one of the masters of science, “our best
prayer is to form afresh a synthesis of the sciences.”[217] Well, if
modern anatomy has taught us that the initial phase of the development
of the egg differs according to the animal,[218] even as nothing
resembles less the development of certain bones of the face than that
of their neighbours, how shall we dare to compare any animal with
man?[219] Having said this, let us return to the influence of climate
upon wild or free animals.
Isidore Geoffroy quotes, with complacency, the instance of the Corsican
and African stag taken from Europe to these two countries scarcely
twenty centuries ago, which form at the present day two clearly
distinct varieties. From that the author of the _Histoire Naturelle
Générale_ argues rapid and sensible modifications, caused by the action
of the medium. But, first of all, the evidence of this fact is simply
negative; the old authors, who denied the existence of the stag in
Corsica and Africa, were perhaps simply ignorant of it. Then, this
introduction, if it did take place, was perhaps performed by means
of animals which had been kept in domesticity or captivity for many
generations, and consequently, were easily able to change their mode of
life directly they recovered their liberty, as we have already said.
However this may be, it is simply man himself whom it is necessary to
examine, without comparing him to any animal, and without misleading
ourselves with the connexion of climates, generally compared too
hastily, and with regard to mere equality of temperature.
It is sufficient to run over, in Humboldt’s _Cosmos_, the lengthy
enumeration of circumstances which make up a climate, in order to
understand that all the comparisons which our minds may make between
any two regions of the world are, at least, rash. The analogy of two
climates is rather a sort of experimental notion, which can only be
reasonably deduced by the similarity of the biological as well as
the meteorological phenomena of every kind in the two regions to be
compared. And when climates shall have been able to change a white
man into a black (a fact we energetically deny), must we also lay to
the charge of meteorological influence the clear moral aptitude and
profound differences of the various species of mankind? Shall we admit
that a little more cold or heat will alter the intellect? and why not
language?
But _we_ are not the first to doubt all these marvels. Bacon[220]
and Albin[221] fairly doubted the effect of the sun on the colour of
the skin. Camper, who admitted that all varieties come from external
influences, acknowledged, and with good faith, that the influences
which we can appreciate are not sufficient to explain fully either the
prominent jaw-bone in the Negro, the cheek-bone in the Kalmuc, or the
obliquity of the eyes in the Chinese and the Malay, etc. We can declare
the same about all the other peculiarities of the same order,--the
flattening of the nose, the crisped state of the hair, the colouring
matter which we find even in the arch of the palate in the Negro, etc.
We owe a very good observation to Camper: “The black colour which
is noticed in the natural parts of both sexes, and even in white
individuals, clearly proves that our reticular membrane has its colour
only from the blood.”[222] This fact alone should have long ago given
a more rational impulse to researches on this subject. If--putting all
these hypotheses on one side, for all that we can bring forward has no
other value--if we wish to study in a _positive_ manner the influence
of the sky upon man, we have only in reality one resource,--it is to
shut ourselves up in the limits of history, to study the effect of the
migrations of which it tells us, and to see whether man, transported
far away, _does_ become modified, and how this modification takes
place. Then we shall find two answers to these questions, which form
together a kind of anthropological law.
LAW.--_In historical times, either man_ (we mean a society of men) _who
is taken far from his medium does not alter his type, or he entirely
disappears_.
What nation has been transformed? We cannot answer, even with history
in our hand; we know not of any. And yet, the short period of time
embraced by the records of mankind would be quite sufficient if it were
true, as Isidore Geoffroy thought, that we could conclude from animals
to men, and that two thousand years would have been sufficient to alter
fundamentally the _genus_ stag.[223] It is a well-known fact, that the
inhabitants of the Island of Bourbon, who were colonists established
in the high lands for two centuries, have preserved intact the purity
of their blood.[224] The Spanish and Portuguese families established
in Brazil, and who have carefully avoided foreign marriages, have
lost nothing, it is said, of their original characteristics.[225] The
Icelanders have not become Laplanders in their own island, and they
have now been established there eight hundred years; they are as fair
and _German-looking_ as at first.[226] The Dutch have prospered at
the Cape under the name of Boers. They say that at Cochin and Malabar
there exists a Jewish tribe, which has been established there for a
long time, and which traces back its origin to the captivity; it has
remained pure,[227] and as similar to the inhabitants of the Jewish
quarter at Cairo, as to the Jews in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper,
and in the pictures of the Flemish school.
Indeed, among ourselves in Europe, have not the Irish preserved, under
their foggy and cold sky, that southern nature which is revealed in
their taste for certain arts, their small height, their black hair,
the vivacity of the women, and the indolence of the men? Now, here is
another order of facts,--man is not altered by emigration. Perhaps
these facts are not very conclusive to all people, either on account of
the difficulty of observation, or the short period which they embrace.
They must be taken just as science offers them to us, and we must give
our attention solely to reckoning the conclusion from the value of the
premises.
We now arrive at the second term of the law which we have laid
down,--that man, transported to another country, eventually disappears.
The theory which we thus form is of considerable importance. It has
even received a particular name, it has been called the _Theory of
the non-Cosmopolitanism of Man_. It is at the present day defended in
France by Dr. Boudin, with as much energy as talent. In this matter,
facts are abundant enough, and they at once take a considerable
significance; and this is determined by figures, so that we must
acknowledge that in most cases each race is by its nature attached to
the ground which supports it, and that it is not with impunity that it
oversteps its limits.
It is because a foreign climate has in general a really destructive
influence, producing degeneracy among emigrants, that is to say, a
parallel morbid alteration of both the intellect and the body, that
we always see the same races moving about in the same areas, and
disappear when they pass them.[228] If the Semite, who has left Yemen,
has come to pasture his camels near the shores of the ocean, opposite
the Fortunate Islands, it is because he and his animals find in the
Riff the same conditions of life that they did by the Nile and the
Isthmus of Suez. Whatever has been said about the Jews and some other
races, not one of them seems to be really cosmopolitan. To admit that a
Jewish tribe, thrown into the midst of a black population, has become
black by the sole action of the climate, is to admit that there were
no conversions, no adoptions, and no sexual unions contrary to the
law of Moses; and in this way the philosophic editors of the Code
Napoléon, as well as daily medical practice, teach us what to think.
For our part, we only see in these transformations of Jewish families,
established far away, the result of the absorption of the type of a
small group of emigrants by a population which outnumbers them. The Jew
has disappeared; the language has been transmitted like the belief, and
also the name.
The acclimatisation of man, as well as of the wild animal, takes place
only when he finds the conditions of existence sensibly identical with
those in which he has been created. Beyond that, nature punishes him
for having overstepped the limits which she had assigned to him, and
within which he ought to continue to move his organism in relation to
this defined medium. The domestic animal, on the contrary, by reason
of this malleability of which we have before spoken, accommodates
itself in general very conveniently. And the varieties which it shows
on recovering its liberty, are of themselves a proof that it has been
under a different sky to that of its original country.
Such is, in our opinion, the sole manner of explaining at the present
day, in a serious and general point of view, all climateric influences.
We must render justice to some monogenists, that they have perfectly
understood the real part taken by these influences. Blumenbach calls
them _causæ degenerationis_; and here the German anatomist, in
defending, like Prichard, the specific unity of the human race, raises
himself above the English anthropologist, without, however, reaching
what we believe to be the truth. Prichard, inclining to the belief that
humanity is entirely descended from the Negroes,[229] acknowledged,
consequently, a kind of _causæ perfectionis_, that is to say, an
ascending march of phenomena, where his predecessor had only seen an
inverse march. Now, this ascending march of phenomena is difficult to
reconcile with the notion of the specific unity of man. Every species,
in fact, is necessarily constituted by reason of the defined space in
which it ought to move. It is unreasonable to suppose that elsewhere
the same organism and the same species can meet with more favourable
conditions of existence.
In Blumenbach’s opinion, all races are unhealthy deviations from a
primitive type, of which we are the representatives;[230] so that
nine-tenths of the human kind are, according to him, composed of
degenerate individuals. Blumenbach did not know that one of the
essential characters of degeneracy is the limited development of its
produce, that is to say, the disappearance of the race at a more or
less distant period.[231] We ask ourselves only how monogenists, who
all partake more or less of Blumenbach’s opinions, and who nearly all
pride themselves on moral and humanitarian sentiments, can consent
to lower in this manner the number of human beings who are worthy of
this name? Is not the best part, if there could be one in the case of
science, played by the polygenists, who consider that other races are
special entities, pursuing an end, which is their own and not ours,
and dividing with us the planet, inaccessible in all its extent to the
Iranian; just as certain kinds of animals, likewise, cover the globe
with different species? Climate, we have said, has a decisive influence
upon a man taken to another country; it must only be understood in
the sense of this influence, and we have seen that it is generally a
pernicious one.[232] It makes itself felt in the physical and moral
nature of man, both deeply and superficially.
We may point out among the most simple and the most profound climateric
influences, the _sun-burn_, the study of which is so interesting in
anthropological study. We know, at the present day, that the sun is
far from being always the cause of it; that a bivouac _at night_ has
as powerful an action in the same manner, and that the north-pole
explorers found that their hands and faces were browned under a
northern sky.[233]
Are these not facts which will diminish the decisive part which has so
long been given to solar heat in the production of colouring matter in
the Negro?[234] The colour of sun-burn does not even seem to remain
in the layers of the epidermis, in which the normal colour is found.
Indeed, we must remember, that it is always easy to distinguish a
sun-burnt nation, since individuals who, for some reason or other,
are but seldom exposed to external influences, like the women, are
infinitely whiter; children are quite white when born, but as soon as
they go much into the air, they become brown.
Unfortunately, the action of climate upon a man taken from his own
country is not merely a case of sun-burn. And medical statistics have
shown, in treating on the different races of mankind, the dangers of
changing one’s position on the surface of the globe, even if it takes
place in the sense of isothermal lines. We find from the results
of careful inquiries made in the English colonies at the Antilles
for about forty years, that the black population is continually
diminishing, the number of deaths being to that of births :: 28 : 24.
Under the tropics, northern organisations are much disquieted, life
changes its aspect, and its course is much more rapid. The glandular
system governs;[235] man becomes “more sensible to pleasure, and less
disposed to activity,”[236] his mind loses its vivacity. Those noble
faculties, which have made the white man the monarch of creation,
become weakened, and that especially in some colonies where government
is obliged to entrust everything to Europeans.[237] Dr. Barnard Davis
lately announced to the Paris Anthropological Society,[238] that one of
his friends, Dr. J. A. Wise, after thirty years residence in India, had
never been able, after numerous inquiries, to find any descendants of a
European in the third generation.
Our temperate regions are to the Negro what the tropical zone is to
the European. Even at Gibraltar,[239] the Negro contingent that was
employed in the English army paid a heavy tribute to death.[240] On
the contrary, official documents for 1861 tell us that, at Sierra
Leone,[241] the respective mortality of English and Negro soldiers was
as follows:--
Deaths per 1000.
English. Negroes.
Marsh fevers 410·2 2·4
Dysentery 41·3 5·3
Liver disease 6·0 1·1
It is an indubitable fact that, in general, the mortality of an
emigrated population is in an inverse ratio to the distance they are
taken.[242] During many years the island of Ceylon was occupied by
Hindú troops (from Madras and Bengal), Malays, Negroes and English. The
mortality of these races respectively was, 12, 24, 50, and 69.
This is so clearly a biological law, that we again meet with its
application even in certain particular cases. Concerning the yellow
fever, for instance, Townsend has thus laid down a rule,--“The
mortality to the new-comer from the cooler latitudes may be said to
be in an exact ratio to the distance from the equator of his place of
nativity.”[243] Daniel Blair[244] has given the following statistics,
according to his observations of the same disease, made in British
Guiana, from 1827 to 1835:--
Natives (West Indian Islanders) 6·9
French and Italians 17·1
English, Scotch, and Irish 19·3
Germans and Dutch 20·2
Scandinavians and Russians 27·7
The epidemic of 1853, at New Orleans, allowed Barton to make a scale of
mortality on the same principle, and absolutely comparable, and which
would take away all doubt in this respect, if any existed.[245]