The plurality of the human racePouchet, G. (Georges)
Philosophy
The plurality of the human race
Pouchet, G. (Georges)
Monogenism and polygenism
Unfortunately, the action of climate upon a man taken from his own
country is not merely a case of sun-burn. And medical statistics have
shown, in treating on the different races of mankind, the dangers of
changing one’s position on the surface of the globe, even if it takes
place in the sense of isothermal lines. We find from the results
of careful inquiries made in the English colonies at the Antilles
for about forty years, that the black population is continually
diminishing, the number of deaths being to that of births :: 28 : 24.
Under the tropics, northern organisations are much disquieted, life
changes its aspect, and its course is much more rapid. The glandular
system governs;[235] man becomes “more sensible to pleasure, and less
disposed to activity,”[236] his mind loses its vivacity. Those noble
faculties, which have made the white man the monarch of creation,
become weakened, and that especially in some colonies where government
is obliged to entrust everything to Europeans.[237] Dr. Barnard Davis
lately announced to the Paris Anthropological Society,[238] that one of
his friends, Dr. J. A. Wise, after thirty years residence in India, had
never been able, after numerous inquiries, to find any descendants of a
European in the third generation.
Our temperate regions are to the Negro what the tropical zone is to
the European. Even at Gibraltar,[239] the Negro contingent that was
employed in the English army paid a heavy tribute to death.[240] On
the contrary, official documents for 1861 tell us that, at Sierra
Leone,[241] the respective mortality of English and Negro soldiers was
as follows:--
Deaths per 1000.
English. Negroes.
Marsh fevers 410·2 2·4
Dysentery 41·3 5·3
Liver disease 6·0 1·1
It is an indubitable fact that, in general, the mortality of an
emigrated population is in an inverse ratio to the distance they are
taken.[242] During many years the island of Ceylon was occupied by
Hindú troops (from Madras and Bengal), Malays, Negroes and English. The
mortality of these races respectively was, 12, 24, 50, and 69.
This is so clearly a biological law, that we again meet with its
application even in certain particular cases. Concerning the yellow
fever, for instance, Townsend has thus laid down a rule,--“The
mortality to the new-comer from the cooler latitudes may be said to
be in an exact ratio to the distance from the equator of his place of
nativity.”[243] Daniel Blair[244] has given the following statistics,
according to his observations of the same disease, made in British
Guiana, from 1827 to 1835:--
Natives (West Indian Islanders) 6·9
French and Italians 17·1
English, Scotch, and Irish 19·3
Germans and Dutch 20·2
Scandinavians and Russians 27·7
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