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قراءة كتاب Man and His Migrations
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
fully established, nor is there now any radical imperfection in the method observed in this department of science by its most distinguished modern teachers.”
This could not have been written thirty years ago. The department of science would, then, have been indefinite; and the teachers would not have been distinguished.
It may now be as well to say what Ethnology and Anthropology are not. Their relations to history have been considered. Archæology illustrates each; yet the moment that it is confounded with either, mischief follows. Psychology, or the Science of the laws of Mind, has the same relation to them as Physiology—mutatis mutandis; i.e. putting Mind in the place of Body.
But nearer than either are its two subordinate studies of Ethology[3], or the Science of Character, by which we determine the kind of character produced in conformity with the laws of Mind, by any set of circumstances, physical as well as moral; and the Science of Society which investigates the action and reaction of associated masses[4] on each other.
Such then is our Science; which the principle of Division of Labour requires to be marked off clearly in order to be worked advantageously. And now we ask the nature of its objects. It has not much to do with the establishment of any laws of remarkable generality; a circumstance which, in the eyes of some, may subtract from its value as a science; the nearest approach to anything of this kind being the general statement implied in the classifications themselves. Its real object is the solution of certain problems—problems which it investigates by its own peculiar method—and problems of sufficient height and depth and length and breadth to satisfy the most ambitious. All these are referable to two heads, and connect themselves with either the past or the future history of our species; its origin or destination.
We see between the Negro and the American a certain amount of difference. Has this always existed? If not, how was it brought about? By what influences? In what time? Quickly or slowly? These questions point backwards, and force upon us the consideration of what has been.
But the next takes us forwards. Great experiments in the transfer of populations from one climate to another have gone on ever since the discovery of America, and are going on now; sometimes westwards as to the New World; sometimes eastwards as to Australia and New Zealand; now from Celtic populations like Ireland; now from Gothic countries like England and Germany; now from Spain and Portugal;—to say nothing of the equally great phænomenon of Negro slavery being the real or supposed condition of American prosperity. Will this succeed? Ask this at Philadelphia, or Lima, Sydney, or Auckland, and the answer is pretty sure to be in the affirmative. Ask it of one of our English anatomists. His answer is as follows:—“Let us attend now to the greatest of all experiments ever made in respect of the transfer of a population indigenous to one continent, and attempting by emigration to take possession of another; to cultivate it with their own hands; to colonize it; to persuade the world, in time, that they are the natives of the newly occupied land. Northern America and Australia furnished the fields of this, the greatest of experiments. Already has the horse, the sheep, the ox, become as it were indigenous to these lands. Nature did not place them there at first, yet they seem to thrive and flourish, and multiply exceedingly. Yet, even as regards these domestic animals, we cannot be quite certain. Will they eventually be self-supporting? Will they supplant the llama, the kangaroo, the buffalo, the deer? or in order to effect this, will they require to be constantly renovated from Europe? If this be the contingency, then the acclimatation is not perfect. How is it with man himself? The man planted there by nature, the Red-Indian, differs from all others on the face of the earth; he gives way before the European races, the Saxon and the Celtic; the Celt, Iberian, and the Lusitanian in the south; the Celt and the Saxon in the north.
“Of the tropical regions of the New World, I need not speak; every one knows that none but those whom nature placed there can live there; that no Europeans can colonize a tropical country. But may there not be some doubts of their self-support in milder regions? Take the Northern States themselves. There the Saxon and the Celt seem to thrive beyond all that is recorded in history. But are we quite sure that this is fated to be permanent? Annually from Europe is poured a hundred thousand men and women of the best blood of the Scandinavian, and twice the number of the pure Celt; and so long as this continues, he is sure to thrive. But check it, arrest it suddenly, as in the case of Mexico and Peru; throw the onus of reproduction upon the population, no longer European, but a struggle between the European alien and his adopted father-land. The climate; the forests; the remains of the aborigines not yet extinct; last, not least, that unknown and mysterious degradation of life and energy, which in ancient times seems to have decided the fate of all the Phœnician, Grecian, and Coptic colonies. Cut off from their original stock, they gradually withered and faded, and finally died away. The Phœnician never became acclimatized in Africa, nor in Cornwall, nor in Wales; vestiges of his race, it is true, still remain, but they are mere vestiges. Peru and Mexico are fast retrograding to their primitive condition; may not the Northern States, under similar circumstances, do the same?
“Already the United States man differs in appearance from the European: the ladies early lose their teeth; in both sexes the adipose cellular cushion interposed between the skin and the aponeuroses and muscles disappears, or, at least, loses its adipose portion; the muscles become stringy, and show themselves; the tendons appear on the surface; symptoms of premature decay manifest themselves. Now what do these signs, added to the uncertainty of infant life in the Southern States, and the smallness of their families in the Northern, indicate? Not the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon into the Red-Indian, but warnings that the climate has not been made for him, nor he for the climate.