Darwinism. The Noachian Flood: A lecture delivered before the Torquay Natural History Society, Jan. 31st, 1870 — John Shaqi
Darwinism. The Noachian Flood: A lecture delivered before the Torquay Natural History Society, Jan. 31st, 1870Stebbing, Thomas Roscoe Rede
Religion
Darwinism. The Noachian Flood: A lecture delivered before the Torquay Natural History Society, Jan. 31st, 1870
Stebbing, Thomas Roscoe Rede
Deluge; Evolution; Natural selection
But, in truth, there is no question of 4000 years in the matter; for
there were black people in the time of Herodotus and in the time of
Solomon. Already in the time of Moses there existed a race in Palestine
so different from the Israelites, that the first Hebrew explorers were
daunted by the sight of them, although, in fact, they were looking on a
race no longer in its prime, but one that was dying out. Egyptian
monuments, dating back to the same period and earlier, give
representations of Africans, Asiatics and Europeans, with their physical
characteristics then as now unmistakeably distinct; they portray the
Negro as the Negro still is both in colour and in features. {23}
If it took only 800 years, then, which is the interval between the Flood
and the birth of Moses, to originate and establish types so distinct as
Jews, Egyptians, Negroes, and Anakim, all gathered together in a little
corner of the world, might not Nature, having done so much in so short a
time for the highest animal, do a little more in a longer time for lower
animals, and so supply that origin of species by variation for which Mr.
Darwin contends? Would not the obvious inference be that Nature had done
so, if it were not fancied that such an origin of species was still more
repugnant to the Book of Genesis than even a limitation of the area
covered by the Flood? But the Darwinian theory, happily for itself, is
not dependent upon any supposition so incredible as one which would
warrant us in expecting among the descendants, for example, of William
the Conqueror, people as little like one another as John Bull and John
Chinaman, Uncle Sambo and the last of the Mohicans. There are
circumstances of immense weight to convince us that certain marked
divisions of mankind originated in the regions which they are now
occupying. There are other circumstances preponderating for the common
origin of mankind. Darwinism has at length shown how these phenomena can
be reconciled, by simply connecting the history of man with that vast
duration of life upon the globe which geological science has unveiled.
The likenesses among races of men demand a common parentage for all those
races; the unlikenesses can only be accounted for on the view of an
isolation immensely protracted of one race from another. Thus the
primary origin is common to all; the secondary origin is peculiar to
each: but now that the primary origin has been proved to be so vastly
more remote than was once supposed, the secondary origin recedes of
itself into a far distant past, to give time for differences to arise and
develope, since, if the actually existing unlikenesses were only skin
deep, instead of affecting, as they do, the bones of the skeleton and the
whole fibre of the mind, they would still be too great to admit a common
derivation of the whole human family from the patriarch Noah.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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