Volume 1

The Natural history of man : comprising inquiries into the modifying influence of physical and moral agencies on the different tribes of the human family / by James Cowles Prichard, M.D. F.R.S. M.R.I.A., President of the Ethnological Society, corresponding member of the National Institute, and of the Royal Academy of Medicine, and of the Statistical Society, of France, member of the American Philosophical Society; etc.

James Cowles Prichard

Date:: 1855

Credit: The Natural history of man : comprising inquiries into the modifying influence of physical and moral agencies on the different tribes of the human family / by James Cowles Prichard, M.D. F.R.S. M.R.I.A., President of the Ethnological Society, corresponding member of the National Institute, and of the Royal Academy of Medicine, and of the Statistical Society, of France, member of the American Philosophical Society; etc. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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French; aud very many iudividuala exhibit the blended features which might be expected from the continual intermarriages of such persons, some of whose children, as observed above, have the intermediate character. In the north of India, where the comparatively fair race who spoke Sanskrit are most largely grafted upon the aboriginal dark-coloured tribesj the variety of feature aud complexion noticed iu the same community, and even in the same family, is commented upon by observant travellers,—just as if tiie people, which was a mixed race a thousand years ago, were a population actually made up of individuals born in different places, and accidentally met upon the same ground. When two individuals of remote races unite, as in India or America, the immediate offspring is almost universally of mingled characters, though, as observed by Van Amringe, who had devoted much attention to the subject, the children [of mulattoes] seldom exhibit the medium colour of their parents. But all recorded evidence declares mulattoes or half-castes to be more liable to disease, and of shorter life, than either parent, and shows that their intermarriages are decidedly less prolific than those of other persons, though all these effects are less seen in the southern states of the American Union, and in Central America, where the white man is less white than the New Euglander. Colonel Smith, in his ]Satuial History of Man, doubts exceedingly if a mulatto family does exist, or could exist, in any part of the tropics, continued to the fourth generation from any one stock. Dr. Knox, in his work on the Races of Men, says, with the cessation of the supply of European blood, the mulatto of all shades must cease. There is no doubt that offspring does arise from these mixed unions, but it swerves more and more to the black and white originals, until it takes its place in one or the other body. Here, however, the writer admits the insufficiency of proof that this is owing to the working of the law of decomposition, which he has found or imagined, rather than of irregu- larity on the part of the wife, which is likely, and not to be judged too harshly in a class of persona so iinfairly degraded and despised as those of African descent in America, or of half-blood iu India. In sheep and cattle the want, of permanency appears to be an admitted fact: the words of Dr. Knox are, by no effort, saving that of constant, never-ceasing inter- mixture or draughts on the pure breeds, can a mixed breed be maintained ; and all practical men teU. us the same. In the case where two individuals of similar races unite—such as the Celt and Teuton,—theimmediate result is,as stated before, new Celts and Teutons, with a proportion of individuals of mingled characters, in whom the decom- position is deferred to another generation, giving rise to the phenomenon 80 frequently seen now,and observed twenty centuries ago by Lucretius,—the

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