Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

one time killed and devoured every Dutchman they could lay their hands upon.

It is truly wonderful that a scholar of Lord Monboddo's accomplishments could have allowed himself to be for one moment imposed upon by a mass of trash so absurd and extravagant as not to be worth the trouble of confuting. Such romances are certainly in existence; but they are nothing more than the fabled news of a few low and illiterate mariners, whose names were never sufficient to give them the slighest degree of authority, even when they were first uttered; and which, for the most part, dropped successively into an obscure and ignominious grave on the moment of their birth, and would have silently mouldered away into their elemental nothingness, had not this very singular writer chosen to rake up their decomposing atoms, in order to support an hypothesis which sufficiently proves its own weakness by the scouted and extravagant evidence to which it is compelled to appeal.

Of the wild men and wild women of Linnæus, some appear to have been idiots, escaped from their keepers; a few exaggerated accounts of stray children from some wretched hovel of Lithuanian peasants; and one of them, a young negress, who, during a shipwreck on the French coast, had swam on shore, and at once saved herself from death, and, what is worse than death, from slavery. She is said to have been found in the woods of Champagne, about the middle of the last century, and was at first exhibited under the name of la fille sauvage and la belle sauvage; and had the honor, soon afterward, of being painted as a sign-post to one of our most celebrated inns in this metropolis, which is still known by the name of the Bell Savage. This young negress was instructed in the French language by the family into whose hospitable hands she fell, and was afterward, from some unaccountable whim, denominated Mademoiselle LE BLANC.*

In order, however, to settle this question completely, let me mention a few of the anatomical points in which the orang-otang differs from the human form, and which cannot possibly be the effect of a mere variety, but must necessarily flow from an original and inherent I distinction. More might be added, but what I shall offer will be sufficient; and if I do not touch upon a comparison of the interior faculties, it is merely because I will neither insult your understandings nor degrade my own, by bringing them into any kind of contact.

* See Monboddo on the Origin of Language, &c. vol. i. p. 193. 480.

Both the orang and pongo, which of all the monkey tribes make the nearest approach to the structure of the human skeleton, have three vertebræ fewer than man. They have a peculiar membranous pouch connected with the larynx or organ of the voice, which belongs to no division of man whatever, white or black. The larynx itself is, in consequence of this, so peculiarly constructed as to render it less capable even of inarticulate sounds than that of almost every other kind of quadruped: and, lastly, they have no proper feet; for what are so called are, in reality, as directly hands as the terminal organs of the arms: the great toe in man, and that which chiefly enables him to walk in an erect position, being a perfect thumb in the orang-otang. Whence this animal is naturally formed for climbing: and its natural position in walking, and the position which it always assumes excepting when under discipline, is that of all-fours; the body being supported on four hands, instead of on four feet as in quadrupeds. And it is owing to this wide and essential difference, as, indeed, we had occasion to observe in our last study, that M. Cuvier, and other zoologists of the present day, have thought it expedient to invent a new name by which the monkey and maucauco tribes may be distinguished from all the rest; and, instead of quadru PEDS, have called them QUADRumana, or quaDRUMANUALS; by which they are at the same time equally distinguished from every tribe of the human race, which are uniformly, and alone, BIMANUAL.

But throwing the monkey kind out of the question, as in no respect related to the race of man, it must at least be admitted, contend the second class of philosophers before us, that the wide differences in form, and color, and degree of intellect, which the several divisions of mankind exhibit, as you have now arranged them, must necessarily have originated from different sources; and that even the Mosaic account itself will afford countenance to such an hypothesis.

This opinion was first stated, in modern times, by the celebrated Isaac Peyrere, librarian to the prince of Conde; who, about the middle of last century, contended, in a book which was not long afterward condemned to the flames, though for other errors in conjunction with the present, that the narration of Moses speaks expressly of the creation of two distinct species of man; an elder species which occupied a part of the sixth day's creation, and is related in the first chapter of Genesis; and a junior, confined to Adam and Eve, the immediate progenitors of the Hebrews, to whom this account was addressed; and which is not referred to till the seventh verse of the

in which they were formed. After which transaction, observes this writer and those who think with him, the historian confines himself entirely to the annals of his own nation, or of those which were occasionally connected with it. Neither is it easy, they adjoin, to conceive upon any other explanation, how Cain in so early a period of the world as is usually laid down, could have been possessed of the implements of husbandry which belonged to him; or what is meant

by the fear he expressed, upon leaving his father's family, after the murder of Abel, that every one who found him would slay him; or, again, his going forth into another country, marrying a wife there, and building a city soon after the birth of his eldest son.

Now, a cautious perusal of the Mosaic narrative will, I think, incontestably prove that the two accounts of the creation of man refer to one and the same fact, to which the historian merely returns, in the seventh verse of the second chapter, for the purpose of giving it a more detailed consideration; for it is expressly asserted in the fifth, or preceding verse but one, as the immediate reason for the creation of Adam and Eve, that at that "time there was not a man to till the ground;" while, as to the existence of artificers competent to the formation of the first rude instruments employed in husbandry, and a few patches of mankind scattered over the regions adjoining that in which Cain resided, at the period of his fratricide, it should be recollected that this first fall of man by the hand of man, did not take place till a hundred and twenty-nine years after the creation of Adam: for it was in his one hundred and thirtieth year that Seth was given to him in the place of Abel: an interval of time amply sufficient, especially if we take into consideration the peculiar fecundity of both animals and vegetables in their primeval state, for a multiplication of the race of man, to an extent of many thousand souls.

On such a view of the subject, therefore, it should seem that the only fair and explicit interpretation that can be given to the Mosaic history is, that the whole human race has proceeded from one single pair, or in the words of another part of the Sacred writings, that God "hath made of ONE BLOOD all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth."* The book of nature is in this as in every other respect in union with that of Revelation: it tells us that one single pair must have been adequate to all the purposes on which this class of philosophers have grounded their objections: and it should be farther observed to them, that thus to multiply causes without necessity

* Acts, xvii. 26.

[ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors]

Both the orang and pongo, which of all the monkey tribes make the nearest approach to the structure of the human skeleton, have three vertebræ fewer than man. They have a peculiar membranous pouch connected with the larynx or organ of the voice, which belongs to no division of man whatever, white or black. The larynx itself is, in consequence of this, so peculiarly constructed as to render it less capable even of inarticulate sounds than that of almost every other kind of quadruped: and, lastly, they have no proper feet; for what are so called are, in reality, as directly hands as the terminal organs of the arms: the great toe in man, and that which chiefly enables him to walk in an erect position, being a perfect thumb in the orang-otang. Whence this animal is naturally formed for climbing: and its natural position in walking, and the position which it always assumes excepting when under discipline, is that of all-fours; the body being supported on four hands, instead of on four feet as in quadrupeds. And it is owing to this wide and essential difference, as, indeed, we had occasion to observe in our last study, that M. Cuvier, and other zoologists of the present day, have thought it expedient to invent a new name by which the monkey and maucauco tribes may be distinguished from all the rest; and, instead of QUADRU PEDS, have called them QUADRUMANA, or QUADRUMANUALS; by which they are at the same time equally distinguished from every tribe of the human race, which are uniformly, and alone, BIMANUAL.

But throwing the monkey kind out of the question, as in no respect related to the race of man, it must at least be admitted, contend the second class of philosophers before us, that the wide differences in form, and color, and degree of intellect, which the several divisions of mankind exhibit, as you have now arranged them, must necessarily have originated from different sources; and that even the Mosaic account itself will afford countenance to such an hypothesis.

This opinion was first stated, in modern times, by the celebrated Isaac Peyrere, librarian to the prince of Conde; who, about the middle of last century, contended, in a book which was not long afterward condemned to the flames, though for other errors in conjunction with the present, that the narration of Moses speaks expressly of the creation of two distinct species of man; an elder species which occupied a part of the sixth day's creation, and is related in the first chapter of Genesis; and a junior, confined to Adam and Eve, the immediate progenitors of the Hebrews, to whom this account was addressed; and which is not referred to till the seventh verse of the

in which they were formed. After which transaction, observes this writer and those who think with him, the historian confines himself entirely to the annals of his own nation, or of those which were occasionally connected with it. Neither is it easy, they adjoin, to conceive upon any other explanation, how Cain in so early a period of the world as is usually laid down, could have been possessed of the implements of husbandry which belonged to him; or what is meant by the fear he expressed, upon leaving his father's family, after the murder of Abel, that every one who found him would slay him; or, again, his going forth into another country, marrying a wife there, and building a city soon after the birth of his eldest son.

Now, a cautious perusal of the Mosaic narrative will, I think, incontestably prove that the two accounts of the creation of man refer to one and the same fact, to which the historian merely returns, in the seventh verse of the second chapter, for the purpose of giving it a more detailed consideration; for it is expressly asserted in the fifth, or preceding verse but one, as the immediate reason for the creation of Adam and Eve, that at that "time there was not a man to till the ground;" while, as to the existence of artificers competent to the formation of the first rude instruments employed in husbandry, and a few patches of mankind scattered over the regions adjoining that in which Cain resided, at the period of his fratricide, it should be recollected that this first fall of man by the hand of man, did not take place till a hundred and twenty-nine years after the creation of Adam: for it was in his one hundred and thirtieth year that Seth was given to him in the place of Abel: an interval of time amply sufficient, especially if we take into consideration the peculiar fecundity of both animals and vegetables in their primeval state, for a multiplication of the race of man, to an extent of many thousand souls.

On such a view of the subject, therefore, it should seem that the only fair and explicit interpretation that can be given to the Mosaic history is, that the whole human race has proceeded from one single pair, or in the words of another part of the Sacred writings, that God "hath made of ONE BLOOD all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." The book of nature is in this as in every other respect in union with that of Revelation: it tells us that one single pair must have been adequate to all the purposes on which this class of philosophers have grounded their objections: and it should be farther observed to them, that thus to multiply causes without necessity

*

* Acts, xvii. 26.

« ÎnapoiContinuă »