This is one instance of the entanglement in which the theory of progress, pure and simple, from a parent stock will involve us. The obvious mode of escape would be to deny the unity of the human race, a conclusion which would at once land us in the darkness of a still lower abyss, and convert our processes from being scientific in form and hopeful of result, into empirical and aimless conjectures. For either the theory is started that the various races of mankind were created separately, in which case we fly into the face of the only account we have of creation, and also of the multiform testimonies which history and science bring to attest this truth, and we, moreover, debar ourselves from falling back upon any uniform theory applicable to the whole human race; or if, without advertence to creation, we suppose mankind to have been variously developed, here again we shall equally find ourselves cut off from the application of any uniform historical theory, equally unable to account for or to exclude the testimony of history, and in the end reduced to the evidences, whatever they may be worth, of certain real or fancied analogies.[61] At this point, the historical inquiry will be virtually abandoned, and the records of the past merged in the phenomena of life, will be considered only in the light of some pantheistic or materialistic theory, or, so far as it is distinguishable, of some theory of evolution. [61] The following passage from M. A. Bastian's article in _The Academy_, June 15, 1871, "On the People of India," seems to me to afford an illustration in point--"The natural system becomes an indispensable necessity in every science, so soon as it is clearly seen that the question is not of classification, but of observation of, and insight into, law. Classification was long held to be the sole end, instead of being merely or mainly the means of study. As, in this respect, systematic botany gave place to vegetable physiology, so, in like manner, ethnology will have to look upon its classification of race--with which the school books hitherto have been almost exclusively occupied--as merely a preliminary step towards a physiology of mankind, and to _a science of the laws_ which _govern its spiritual growth_." Now, if no physiology of mankind, in the sense here intended, can be traced, and if "the science of the laws which govern its spiritual growth" (_vide infra_, an exposition of Mr Baring Gould's theory) has come to no definite conclusion, then the only result, as far as science is concerned, will have been the revolutionising of its classifications, and the classifications of the different races of men (and, in so far as they have been accurately ascertained, their confusion will be matter of regret) is the legitimate and ultimate end of ethnology under normal conditions.