Sociology based upon ethnography / by Charles Letourneau ; translated by Henry M. Trollope.

  • Charles Letourneau
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sociology based upon ethnography / by Charles Letourneau ; translated by Henry M. Trollope. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    SOCIOLOGY. CIIAPTEE I. FNUMERATION OP THE HUMAN RACKS. When we attempt to enumerate and to classify the various races of men, the anthropologist and the ethnographer are at once beset with difficulties,—so changeable, so multiform, and so various are the human mammalia. Let it not be thought for a moment that we wish, as do some over-metaphysical anthropologists, to perch man up in the clouds, to pretend that our puny vertebrated body has upon this earth a separate existence of its own—a gulf dividing us from all other animals. Though man is incontestably a mammiferous animal of the highest order, he differs, nevertheless, very widely from his more humble congenerous creatures; for witli him the higher nervous centres, and their use, which is shown in his intelligence, are susceptible of a relatively enormous develop- ment. Again, as far as scientific data will allow us to judge, the origin of man is multiple. It may very well be that the noAv existing human race descends, coming down through a long series of metamorphoses, from monkey-bearing breasts. But these early progenitors of man were very numerous, and even from the first of very various kinds. Starting from this low primitive state, the earliest types that were even nearly human must have been subject to changes from the ordinary habits of life j for during verv long geological cycles man was necessarily obliged to live in various climates, to which he was constrained to adapt himself in order to maintain his own existence. And, in its turn, this labour of accommodating himself to places more or less inclement has become B 2
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