Buffon's Natural History. Volume 04 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, &c. &cBuffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
History
Buffon's Natural History. Volume 04 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, &c. &c
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
Natural history
These people are not the only natives of this Isthmus, for we find
among them men who are white; but their colour is not the white of
Europeans, but rather resembles that of milk, or the hairs of a white
horse. Their skin is covered with a kind of short and whitish down,
which on the cheeks and forehead is not so thick but the skin may be
seen. The hair upon their head and eye-brows is perfectly white; the
former is rather frizled, and from seven to eight inches long. They are
not so tall as the other Indians; and, what is singular, their eye-lids
are of an oblong figure, or rather in the form of a cresent, whose
points turn downwards. So weak are their eyes, that they cannot support
the light of the sun, and they see best by that of the moon. Their
complexion is exceedingly delicate. To all laborious exercises they are
averse; they sleep through the day, and never stir abroad till night.
If the moon shines, they scamper through the forests as nimbly as the
others can in the day. These men do not from a particular and distinct
race, as it sometimes happens, that from parents who are both of a
copper-colour one of these children is produced. Wafer, who relates
these facts, says, that he saw a child, not a year old, who had been
thus produced.
If this were the case, the strange colour, and temperament of these
white Indians, can only be a kind of malady, which they inherit from
their parents. But if, instead of being sprung from the yellow Indians,
they formed a separate race, then would they resemble the Chacrelas of
Java, and the Bedas of Ceylon, whom we have already mentioned. If, on
the other hand, these white people are actually born of copper-coloured
parents, we shall have reason to believe, that the Chacrelas and the
Bedas originate also from parents of the same colour; and that all
the white men, whom we find at such distances from each other, are
individuals who have degenerated from their race by some accidental
cause.
This last opinion, I own, appears to me the most probable; and had
travellers given us as exact descriptions of the Bedas and Chacrelas,
as Wafer has done of the Dariens, we should, perhaps, have discovered
that they were no more of European origin than the latter. This
opinion receives great weight from the fact that negroes sometimes have
white children. Of two of those white negroes we have a description in
the history of the French Academy; one of the two I saw myself, and am
assured there are many to be met with among the other negroes of Africa.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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