And let no one say that it is obsolete matter to treat of science. Orthodox physics and chemistry are indeed no myths. M. Marcel de Serres, who has also occupied himself with anthropology, speaking of the discussions which have been raised between the partisans of emission and those of luminous undulation, adds, that this latter theory has more chances of being exact, “because the facts related by the legislator of the Hebrews seem to him to be more favourable to truth.”[12] The Congregation of the Index, judging Galileo, reasoned in the same way.[13] We arrive thus at once at the proscription of certain inquiries, and we ask ourselves, How two men, so eminent as Humboldt and Bonpland, could have approved of such lines as the following? “The general question of the first origin of the inhabitants of a continent is beyond the limits prescribed to history, _perhaps it may not be even a philosophical question_.”[14] It is true that the work in which this singular declaration is to be found is dedicated to his Catholic Majesty Charles IV. Thanks to these fatal influences, thanks to the interdicts with which some would have desired to stifle the natural history of mankind, as if they were afraid of seeing the spark, which should accomplish the ruin of the past, disappear with the full light; thanks to all these obstacles, anthropology was for a long time thrown into the background. It is in America where we behold it reinstated in its rank, in that country of every kind of liberty. It is there that our old continent ought to go in order to find masters who have known how to enter into scientific pursuits with this free and independent mind which, in old times, according to Epicurus, freed mankind from the yoke of superstition, and gave to intelligence the sceptre of the world. The eighteenth century, with all its scepticism, had not done little in this way; its fault, indeed, was in this scepticism, in this doubting _à priori_. It rejected without examination, therefore its work was not lasting, and the few lines of Voltaire which his good sense had written with a Polygenistic tendency, had no influence at all.[15] At present France and England walk entirely in the scientific path opened by the American school. It is some years since it was vainly endeavoured to establish in these two countries learned societies for the study of ethnology; that time has passed. Now Paris and London maintain two prosperous anthropological societies.[16] We do not hesitate in attributing the reason of this success to the profound discredit in which the continued blending of matters of faith with matters of science, has justly fallen.