"I hope that my demonstrations will have convinced you; meanwhile, I am not ignorant, and you all know, that anthropologists differ. There are among my contemporaries a number of men, even of great merit, who believe in the plurality of the human species. You may possibly come into contact with them. Listen attentively, then, to the reasons they will urge to make you see with their eyes. You will find that their reasonings all tend to prove that there is too great a difference between the negro and the white for them to be of the same species. In reply, state that between the black and the white spaniel, the lap-dog and the mastiff, there exist greater differences than exist between the European and the African. Yet these animals are all dogs. They may argue, perhaps, that man, whatever may have been his characteristics, could not have generated both blacks and whites. Then ask why the wild turkey, whose origin, and that of its ancestors, we are acquainted with, and the wild rabbit, which we find everywhere, could have generated all our domestic races? "We cannot, I repeat, explain perfectly the how and the wherefore; but what we know is, that the fact exists, and we shall find a general explanation in all states of existence--in all conditions of people. "It is not, then, surprising that man presents, in the different groups, the differences herein depicted; man who trod the earth long before the turkey and the rabbit; man, who for centuries has existed upon the surface of the globe, submitting to the most diverse and opposite conditions of existence, multiplying again the causes of those modifications by his manners and habits, by his ways of living, by more or less care in his own preservation; man, finding himself in more marked and varied conditions than those sustained by the animals we have quoted. If anything surprises us, it is that the distinctions are not more considerable. "In turn, ask the polygenists--as those _savans_ are called who believe in the multiplicity of the human species--how it is that when the white man locates in any country, from the antipodes, if you will, or from America or Polynesia--that if he unites with the natives, who differ the most completely from him, these unions are fruitful, and that, above all, there remains traces of this alliance in producing a mongrel race? {76}