The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-09 00:00:00

ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY.

Yesterday evening there was a meeting of this society—
the president, lair, Lubbock, in the chair. A paper was
first read, "On the Weddos, a wild tribe of Ceylon," from
a native, on which a discussion took place.
Mr. GALTON, one of the honorary secretaries, took occa-
sion to notice the influence of salt in the spread of civilisa-
tion, the absence of that substance being generally accom-
panied with a savage state.
A paper by Mr. CRAWFORD was then read, "On the
commixture of the races of man as affecting the progress of
civilisation in the New World," It was not, he observed,
until the discovery of a now world that races of man of
strikingly contrasted qualities came to intermix. The Euro.
pean people of antiquity and of the middle ages had hardly
any experience of such admixtures. In the Western World
the intermixture of nations which followed the conquests—
first of the Romans and afterwards of the northern nations
—was an union of races of equal quality, and hence it could
not be predicted that either improvement or deterioration
was the result. It could not, for example, be safely asserted
that a Greek was superior to a Gaul, or a Roman superior
to a Briton. Very different was the ease in the Eastern
World. There Greeks, Romans, and Goths intermingled
with races greatly inferior to themselves, such as Egyptians
and Syrians, and hence the deterioration to which, in a
great measure, mast be ascribed that decline in civilisation
which ended in the downfall of the Roman power, not re-
sulting, as in Western Europe, in a mixed race of high
endowment and regeneration. The New World offered
to the people of the Old, or at least to such of them as
had the enterprise to enter on it, a field for the intermix-
ture of races on a scale which was before unknown to
them. Nearly the whole of its vast extent was peopled
by one race of man essentially the same, although in
very different states of society, the civilisation attained
by the most advanced among them being, however,
of a very feeble and imperfect character. Physical geography
seems to have been the main cause of the differences which
existed in the social condition of the people of the New
World. The highest civilisation was reached in the tempe-
rate and salubrious climate and forest-free valleys and
plateaux of the Andes. There agricultural nations were
found which had made some progress in the arts, but far
below that of second or even of third civilisations, not only
of Europe, but even of Asia; for they had discovered neither
malleable iron nor written language. With these excep-
tions the rest of the Continent and its islands were peopled
by thinly scattered savages, living as hunters or fishermen
only ; for the pastoral state of Europe and Asia had, in the
absence of the domestic animals indispensable to it, no exis-
tence in America. The discovery of America introduced
new and hostile elements into its population. The people of
Europe poured in, and these, finding the native inhabitants
too weak or unwilling to labour for taskmasters, introduced
some millions of powerful-bodied and feeble-minded but
docile African negroes for that purpose. From these causes
a great and various commixture of races has taken place, of
which the Old World affords no examples. The temperate
regions of the North have been planted with a pure European
race, now far more numerous than were the inhabitants of
the whole American continent at its discovery; the savage
native hunters and fishermen giving way before the invaders
in the same way as have done the wild animals of the woods.
In the forest.clad intertropical and subtropical regions of
America the European nations have been planted in fewer
numbers and under inauspicious conditions, and there many
of the native races still exist in a state not materially
differing from their condition when first discovered. In the
valleys and plateaux of the Andes, however, a very diffe-
rent state of society has sprung up. There a native agri-
cultural population, too numerous and too much fixed to the
soil for expulsion or extermination, existed, and a strange
admixture of races has been the result, necessitating even
the framing of a new nomenclature. Of this state of society
Mexico is the most prominent example. Its present popu-
lation is computed to be in round numbers 8,000,000, of
whom one-half are considered to be pure aborigines, of one
and the same race, yet speaking twenty distinct languages,
fully as many as are spoken by the two hundred millions of
the people of Hindostan. About a million, or one-eighth
part of the whole population, is held to be of pure European
blood; these are the well-known Creoles, from the Spanish
word eriollo, which signifies persons born of European
parents in a colony. This is all that of pure European blood
Spain has planted in the finest part of her American dcmi-
nion in more than three centuries, while England, in about
half the time, has planted four and twenty times that num-
ber of a superior people in a region seemingly less favour-
able. With the exception of the aborigines and a few thou-
sand African negroes, the rest of the people of Mexico, some
3,000,000, consist of various mixed races, for most of which
the Spanish language has specific designations. Of these, as
might be expected, the most numerous are the offspring of
Europeans by natives of the country, and they go under the
name of Mestizos, signifying literally mongrels or hybrids.
The issue of an European by a negro is called in Spanish a
Mulatto, a term which we have ourselves adopted, and which
is evidently a derivation from mule, a mule. The offspring
of a negro by a native American is called a Chino or Chinese,
from, it may be supposed, some imagined resemblance of
such issue to a native of China. The offspring of an Euro-
pean with a Me.tizo or a Mulatto goes under the name of a
Quadroon, and the offspring of the European by the Quad-
roon is called a Quinteroon, terms which signify that the
parties have one-fourth or one-fifth of European or the
best blood in their veins. The cffspring of an Euro-
pean by a Quinteroon is considered equal to a pure
European, that is, in the fourth generation the impure
blood is deemed to be washed out. The term Sambo, which
in the Spanish language literally signifies "bandy-legged,"
is applied to the issue of a negro by a Mulatto, or by a Chino.
The result of the union of so many incongruous races in
Mexico, and the same observation applies in a greater or
less degree to all the States which once constituted the
American colonies of Spain, is a barbarous state of society,
in externals imitating European communities, but yielding
no solid materials for the formation of rational and enlight-
ened self-government. For a full half-century almost
countless revolutions, accompanied by anarchy and disor-
ders, have prevailed nearly over the whole of them, so as to
make it even doubtful whether the people have really been
gainers by their emancipation from a foreign and a very
unenlightened yoke. The European portion of the Mexi-
can population constitutes but a small fraction of the whole,
and cannot therefore rule. Even if it could, its dominion
would be that of a caste by race, much like that which pre-
ceded it. The purely native inhabitants, although a moiety
of the population, are intellectually too feeble to exert any
beneficial influence. They have been converted to Chris-
tianity, and can no longer indulge in the human sacrifices
of their ancestors, but, while not nominally slaves, they are
still but the rural servants of the other classes of the com-
munity. Next to the natives, the most numerous class are
the Mestizos, and these have had a large share in the revo-
lutions and anarchy which have so long distracted Mexico.
The result of the inquiry into the effects of the commixture
of races was thus recapitulated :—Nature has endowed the
various races of man with widely different qualities, bodily
and mental, much in the same way as it has done with seve-
ral closely allied species of the lower animals, as for example
in the cases of the canine and equine families. 'The present
state of the earth and all authentic history, Mr. Crawfurd
maintained, testify to this fact. No one, he said, will at pre-
sent venture to assert that the properties of an European
and an Australian, of a Chinese and of an Andaman
Islander, are identical, or that there exists any law of na-
ture by which one of these parties could have been changed
into the other. When the qualities of different races are
equal, no detriment results from their union. The mongrel
French and English are equal to the pure breeds of Germany
and Scandinavia. When, on the other hand, they are un-
equal, deterioration of the higher race is the inevitable result
A pure Spaniard may be just as good as an Anglo-Saxon of
Virginia or Massachusetts, but no one can imagine that a
Mestizo of Mexico or Peru is on a par with an Anglo-Ame-
rican. In some cases, and under some conoitions, there
exists an antipathy to union that makes an amalgamation
difficult. The aboriginal inhabitants of Spain readily amalga-
mated with Italians, and the descendants of these again with
Goths, but eight centuries were not sufficient to cause
Spaniards effectually to amalgamate with Arabs, and they
finally rid themselves of them by expulsion. The Greek
and Roman conquerors of Egypt, readily admixing with
each other, do not seem to have admixed with the native
Egyptians, who, however, afterwards readily commixed
with the more nearly allied Arabs. Shakspere is, no doubt,
in error, when he calls the celebrated Queen of Egypt a
"tawny" beauty and a
"gipsy," for Cleopatra was a Greek,
and probably as fair as Caesar or Antony. When the dis-
parity of races is extreme no amalgamation at all takes place,
for an antipathy is the result, somewhat similar to that
which prevents intermixture between closely allied species
of the lower animals in the wild state. The Hottentots, the
Caffree, and the negroes of Southern Africa have lived im-
memorially side by side without crossing. The pigmy
negroes of the Malay
Peninsula and those of the Philippines
have dwelt immemorially in the same land with the
Malayan race without the production of a cross race. So
great, indeed, is the antipathy between these races (as far
as we know equally aborigines), that the weaker escapes
extermination only by sheltering itself in the recesses of in-
accessible mountains. The red man of America and the
Eequimaux, although imrrediate neighbours never inter-
mix. But it is in that part of the New 'World in which one
of the highest types of man, whether as to race or civilise.
tion, the Anglo-Saxon, and one of the lowest in both respects
the African negro, have by fortune been brought face to
face, that the antipathy of race is presented in the greatest
intensity and on the largest scale. There the great ma-
jority of the interior are the slaves of the superior,
but even those who have been manumitted are still a
persecuted class, and held by the white man to be as
impure as Brahmins hold outcasts. According to the laws
of the State of Tennessee, no white person can intermarry
with a negro, mulatto, or other person of mixed blood down
to the third generation. All marriages contracted contrary
to this rule are declared null and void, the parties being be-
sides considered guilty of a misdemeanour, and punishable
by fine or imprisonment, or both, at the discretion of the

judge. The laws of the State of Indiana go a step further,
for by them one eighth part of negro blood vitiates a mar-
riage and bastardises the children. The State of Massa-
chusetts adds Indians to negroes in their proscription, and
that of Oregon wholly excludes negroes and even Chinese
from its territory. rJr. Crawford concluded by saying that
it is the presence of the African race, too prone to live and
labour in slavery or in social degradation, and utterly in-
capable of rising to an equality with the higher race among
whom it has been unhappily planted, that has caused the
present distracted state of the North American continent.
The paper gave riso to an animated discussion, in which
Professor Busk, Sir Charles Nicholson, Professor Tyndall,
Mr. Dickenson, Mr. Carter Blake, Mr. Pope, and the pre-
sident took part. Professor Busk expressed the opinion
that a commixture of two distinct races could not be perpe-
tuated unless there were addition from the original stock,
and that in the course of time one or the other race would
be eliminated. Supposing, for example, a community of
mulattoes were settled in an island situated like Fernando
Po, without any communication with whites or blacks, the
white element would in a few generations be eliminated,
and the black race would be restored, such a climate being
more favourable to the existence of the negro than of the
white man. Sir Charles Nicholson altogether dissented
from the hypothesis of original distinction of race, and
considered that the philological researches of Pro-
fessor Max Muller and others had proved that all
the inhabitants of the world derived their origin
from the East. Mr. Dickenson defended the negro's
claim to equality of race with the white man, and attri-
buted his inferior state merely to deficient development,
Mr. Lubbock mentioned that Mr. Mason, the Confederate
commissioner, had affirmed, as evidence that the negro is a
distinct and inferior species of mankind, that mixed breeds
are with difficulty reared beyond a Quadroon, those persons
being generally so delicate that they die early in life. Mr.
Crawfurd replied to the various speakers, and the meeting
then adjourned.