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[22].
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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