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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    parent stocks is incapable of perpetuation.^ It has even been asserted that the United States of America, where the Anglo- Saxon race is still predominant, but which is overrun by immi- grants of various other races, is, by that very circumstance, threatened with decay, inasmuch as this continuous immigra- tion may have the effect of producing a hybrid race containing the germ of future sterility. Do we not know that, on the faith of this prognostication, a certain party has proposed the restriction of foreign immigration, and even in England there have been serious men who have predicted, from ethnological causes, the overthrow of the United States, just as Ezekiel pre- dicted the ruin of Alexandria. When we see the prosperity and the power of the new con- tinent grow with such imexampled rapidity, we can certainly put no faith in such a prediction. Still there must have been a certain number of fundamental facts, which led even mono- genists to deny the viabihty of all crossed races. They must have sought in vain among the nations of the earth for a race manifestly hybrid, with well-defined characters, intermediate between two known races, perpetuating itself without the con- currence of the parent races. When the facts quoted above, says M. Greorges Pouchet, are not sufficient to prove that a mongrel breed cannot be en- gendered, can we anywhere find one ? Do we find a people conserving a medium type between two other types ? We see them nowhere just as little as we see a race of mules. The fact is, that such a race, such a type can only have an ephemeral subjective existence.^ The question, where do we find hybrid races subsisting by themselves, has been asked before M. Pouchet. Dr. Prichard, 1 The sole action of the laws of Hybridity, says Nott, might extermi- nate the whole human species if all the various types of human beings ac- tually existing on the earth were completely to amalgamate. Types of Mankind, p. 407, eighth edit., Philadelphia, 1857. Dr. Eobert Knox is not less explicit. I do not believe that any Mulatto race can be maintained be- yond the third or foui-th generation by M'ulattos mei-ely ; they must inter- niaii-y with the pm-e races or perish. Eobert Knox, The Races of Men, London, 1850. . ,t> • iq-c 2 Georees Pouchet, De la Fluraliti des Races IIuma%nes, p. 140, i ai-is, i&o>^. TA translation of this work will shortly be pubUshcd by the Anthropological Society of London, edited by T. Bendyshe, Esq., M.A., F.A.S.L. Editoe.]