On the phenomena of hybridity in the genus homo / by Paul Broca ; edited, with the permission of the author, by C. Carter Blake.

Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the phenomena of hybridity in the genus homo / by Paul Broca ; edited, with the permission of the author, by C. Carter Blake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    ON THE PHENOMENA .OF HYBRIDITY IN THE HUMAN SPECIES. SECTION I. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON CROSSING IN HUMAN RACES. That very ingenious writer, M, A. de Grobineau,^ whose efforts have been directed towards bringing the light of modern ethnology to bear upon the political and social history of na- tions, but who, in this very difficult and almost entirely new inquiiy, has more than once indulged in paradoxical generalisa- tions, has thought proper to affirm, in his Essay on the Ine- qualihj of Euman Races (1855), that the crossing of races con- stantly produces disastrous effects, and that, sooner or later, a physical and moral degeneration is the inevitable result thereof. It is, therefore, chiefly to this cause that he attributes the decline of the Roman Republic and the downfall of Hberty, which was soon followed by the decline of civihsation. I am very far from sharing his opinion, and, were this the proper place, I might show that the social corruption and the intellectual degradation, which prepared the ruin of the Roman power was due to quite different causes. M. Gobineau^s proposition appears to me by far too general; and I am still more opposed to the opinion of those who advance that every mixed race separated from the * Gobineau, Indgalite des Races Humaines, 8vo, Paris, 1855; [also translated into English, On the Inequality of Human Races, and edited by Henry Hotze, 8vo. Editor.] B