The Sun.
London, England, 1867-11-26 00:00:00

OUR PRO7'O-PARENTS.

Voltaire says somewhere, that the first time a
white man met a nigger he must have felt exces-
sively astonished ; but not more so, he adds, than
he himself would be if any one seriously assured
him that both the white man and the black one
were children of a common parent. What was
thrown out in the shape of a joke by the infidel has
been taken up and made a matter of scientific in-
vestigation by the learned. To prove that the
various races of men spread throughout the earth
are in reality different species, originating in differ
rent proto-parents, with no blood connection be-
tween them, would be a great feather in the cap
of Ethnologists and natural philosophers ; and
what would possibly be equally delightful to some
of them, a blow which would jar to its centre the
framework of supernatural religion.
The question of " the origin of the species" is
therefore an important one, and one moreover on
which much has been written in Germany and
England and France—much that is worthy of the
name of science, and much also which is only fit
for the pastry-cook or the trunk-maker. It ap-
pears to us that Catholics can easily become too
timid and retiring in the face of these bold disco-
verers in the kingdom of physical and natural
science. Just as there is quackery in medicine,
just as there are adventurers in politics, and just
as there arc humbugs in religion, so there are
pedants, rogues, and impostors, to be found in
science. Because a man happens to take up the
Baconian theory of induction, and applies inductive
principles to the phenomena of the visible crea-
tion, he is not thereby at once proved to be a fair
and a skilful, or an impartial and enlightened
philosopher. Bold theories enough, indeed, are
started every day, and bold assertions are made,
and bold solutions to difficult problems are offered
in abundance, and the public is attracted and
listens to the novelty, and Catholics feel uneasy
and perceive some subtle attack upon the Chris-
tian faith ; and yet all this boldness very often
is nothing more than the stupid blundering of
some smatterer, or the outcome of some pet idea
which has been working its way through all man-
ner of tortuous windings into the light of day.
It need hardly be remarked that not religion
simply, but the whole plan of Christian civiliza-
tion, in its antagonism to heathendom, is mightily
affected by this question of the species. Chris-
tianity and heathenism point in diametrically
opposite directions. The one attracts, the other
is repulsive and egotistic. Lactantius, for in-
stance, full of the omne 217211111 spirit of Chris-
tianity, exclaims—" Since we are all sprung from
a common parent, we are related to each other
by blood, and so hatred becomes a species of
fratricide." Galen, on the other hand, full of
the pagan principle of repulsion, declared to his
friends, while inventing some new kind of cure,
that he had his mind fixed in doing so exclusively
on the Greeks, and that he " took no more account
of Germans and barbarians than of bears and
hogs, and other wild beasts." Several American
writers, with Strauss and the materialists, violently
maintain the theory of multiplicity ; for thus they
are able to fix the abominations of cruelty, despo-
tism, and slavery upon a philosophical basis, and
can take out, as it were, a species of scientific
licence for shooting, robbing or poisoning the black
man, as the case may be, and destroying him off
the face of the earth, not from rapacity, but on
the philosophic principle that the inferior species
must make way for the more perfect, and the black
man must be exterminated to make room for the
white.

What at the very outset seems to us rather
strange is the hardihood of those philosophers who
maintain that it is absolutely impossible that the
races of men spread over the earth at this hour
should all be the children of Adam and Eve, since
it is notorious that the first origin of all things is
buried in the most misty scientific obscurity. They
never condescend to explain why the very case in
point should be the one solitary exception to the
universal rule. The fact is, as Liebig implies,
they are not drawing their conclusions from in-
duction, but from their own imaginations. The
learned German investigator, Bischof, tells us clear
enough that science affords us no more information
as to how the first plant came upon the earth, for
instance, than it does of the primary construction
of the heavens, or the primal causes of universal
law. Materialists, who maintain that " matter
alone is true and real," would have man spring out
of the mould of the earth ; for, "if such be not
the case," says Burmeister with charming naivte,
" how can we account for the origin of life without
reference to somehigher influence. If anything
has ever been proved false by induction, it is
this extraordinary theory of a " generatio cuptivoca
.Tontanea ;" and if induction has ever proved
anything to be true, it is what we may call Har-
vey's dictum of "onvie vivens ex ovo." Of course,
much must depend on the definition of the term I
" species." Weighty authorities such as Muller,
Cuvier, Buffon, Saint Hilaire, and a host of others
whom it would be wearisome to mention, agree in
substance with Flourins that "l'espece vient de la
jecondea continue." The character of each species,
Buffon says, forms a type ; and while the accidental
qualities vary, the essential ones remain unaltered.
It is worthy of remark that Aristotle, in his de
anima, has anticipated the moderns in the true
definition of species. Morton and the leaders of
the American school to which we have already re-
ferred seem to possess the monopoly of a defini-
tion which falls in with the practices of South
American blayery. Theo men) curiously and