The History of Creation, Vol. 2 (of 2): Or the Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural CausesHaeckel, Ernst
Science
The History of Creation, Vol. 2 (of 2): Or the Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes
Haeckel, Ernst
Evolution; Heredity; Human beings -- Origin
The difficulties met with in classifying the different races or species
of men are quite the same as those which we discover in classifying
animal and vegetable species. In both cases forms apparently quite
different are connected with one another by a chain of intermediate
forms of transition. In both cases the dispute as to what is a kind or a
species, what a race or a variety, can never be determined. Since
Blumenbach’s time, as is well known, it has been thought that mankind
may be divided into five races or varieties, namely: (1) the Ethiopian,
or black race (African negro); (2) the Malayan, or brown race (Malays,
Polynesians, and Australians); (3) the Mongolian, or yellow race (the
principal inhabitants of Asia and the Esquimaux of North America); (4)
the Americans, or red race (the aborigines of America); and (5) the
Caucasian, or white race (Europeans, north Africans, and south-western
Asiatics). All of these five races of men, according to the Jewish
legend of creation, are said to have been descended from “a single
pair”—Adam and Eve,—and in accordance with this are said to be varieties
of one kind or species. If, however, we compare them without prejudice,
there can be no doubt that the differences of these five races are as
great and even greater than the “specific differences” by which
zoologists and botanists distinguish recognised “good” animal and
vegetable species (“bonæ species”). The excellent palæontologist
Quenstedt is right in maintaining that, “if Negroes and Caucasians were
snails, zoologists would universally agree that they represented two
very excellent species, which could never have originated from one pair
by gradual divergence.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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