M. Gobineau appeals to history, and goes back to the earliest ages of mankind. According to him, three fundamental races, the black, the yellow, and the white, were formed originally. The yellow race occupied the whole of America; the negro race all the southern parts of the old continent as far as the Caspian Sea; the white race was localised in Central Asia. The two former, degraded from an intellectual and moral as well as from a physical point of view, and unable to elevate themselves unaided above the savage state, only existed as _tribes_. The third was the only one which united bodily beauty with a warlike spirit, to the faculty of initiative, of organization and progress, which gives rise to societies and to civilization. The day came when the yellow race burst upon Asia, and, avoiding the central region occupied by the whites, went to people the western regions of the old world. Then, this wave, continuing its course, submerged the white race, which, in its turn, began to emigrate; and by the mixture of its blood with that of the inferior races, produced all the _peoples_ who have succeeded each other upon the earth. At the beginning of this new era, the white blood, being more pure and more abundant, produced superior civilizations. Becoming rarer at each new emigration, it lost its influence, and civilization diminished in every respect. The last effort of this renovating race was the Germanic invasion which destroyed the Roman world. It is now exhausted. The white blood, vitiated by the mixture, has everywhere lost its first efficacy. Mankind for this very reason is in a full decline. The fusion will soon be complete. Every individual will have in his veins one-third of white blood and two-thirds of coloured blood, and we shall then inevitably return to barbarism. Finally, the repeated crossings will have rendered the human species barren; it will then die out and disappear. Such is, in a few words, the theory of M. de Gobineau. Let us accept it with all its hypotheses, including that of the migration from America to Asia, which is contrary to all our knowledge upon this point. Does it follow that the author is consistent? In order to be so, he ought to point out the privileged race, founding by itself one at least of those great societies, one of those _civilizations_, as M. de Gobineau calls them, recorded by history. Now the author is unable to point out a single example, and is obliged to admit that the _exclusively white civilization_ has existed in Central Asia without leaving any other trace than the _tumuli_ which have for a long time been attributed to Scythians, Tchoudes, etc. But everyone knows the state of the whites, when they left their Asiatic centre. In India they were the Aryans, still a half-pastoral race; in Europe, the barbarians who destroyed the Roman world. Had either of them a civilization equal to that of the Egyptians or the Greeks?