colour appears to form a less permanent habit than the red or olive; or in other words, the colour chiefly produced by the action of the sun's colorific rays, than that produced by the action of its calorific rays: for the children of olive and coppercoloured parents exhibit the parental hue from the moment of birth; but in those of blacks it is usually six, eight, or ten months before the black pigment is fully secreted. We also sometimes find this not secreted at all, whence the anomaly of white negroes and sometimes only in interrupted lines or patches, whence the anomaly of spotted negroes; and we have even a few rare cases of negroes in America, who, in consequence of very severe illness, have had the whole of the black pigment absorbed and carried off, and a white pigment diffused in its stead. In other words, we have instances of a black man being suddenly bleached into a white man. These instances are indeed of rare occurrence; but they are sufficient to shew the absurdity of the argument for a plurality of human stocks or species, from a mere difference in the colour of the skin; an argument thus proved to be altogether superficial, and which we may gravely assert to be not more than skin-deep.

"It is in consequence of this power in the system, of secreting a dark-coloured pigment under particular circumstances, that we not unfrequently see the skin of very fair women, when in a state of pregnancy, changed to a deep tawny, and almost to a black; and it is hence that the black pigment of the eye is perpetually maintained and replenished.*

"Dr. Wells gave a paper to the Royal Society, which was read April 1, 1813, containing an account of a woman (Harriet Tresh) whose left shoulder, arm, and hand, are as black as the blackest African's, while all the rest of the skin is very white. She is a native of Sussex, and the cause she assigns is, that her mother set her foot upon a lobster during her pregnancy.' So that we have not only instances of blacks being suddenly

* Camper's Lect. on Comp. Anat. in regard to the Art of Drawing.

bleached, but of whites being made more or less black. In like manner, confined birds sometimes become wholly black; and are said to become so, occasionally, in the course of a single night. So the male kestrel, from being barred on the tail feathers, becomes wholly ash-coloured except at the end; and the heron, gull, and others, whose tail is white when matured, are for the first two years mottled.

"IV. But it is probable that a very great part of the more striking distinctions we have noticed, and almost all the subordinate variations occasionally to be met with, are the result of a MORBID AND HEREDITARY AFFECTION. The vast influence which this recondite but active cause possesses over both the body and the mind, are known in some degree to every one from facts that are daily presenting themselves to us. We see gout, consumption, scrofula, leprosy, propagated on various occasions, and madness and fatuity, and hypochondriacal affections, as frequently. Hence the unhappy race of Albinoes, and whole pedigrees of white negroes; hence the pigmy stature of some families, and the gigantic size of others.

"Even when accident, or a cause we cannot discover, has produced a preternatural conformation or defect in a particular organ, it is astonishing to behold how readily it is often copied by the generative principle, and how tenaciously it adheres to the future lineage. A preternatural defect of the hand or foot has been propagated for many generations, and has in numerous instances laid a foundation for the family name. The name of Varus and Plautus among the ancient Romans afford familiar exemplifications. Hence, hornless sheep and hornless oxen produce an equally hornless offspring; the broad-tailed Asiatic sheep yields a progeny with a tail equally monstrous, and often of not less than half a hundred pounds' weight; and dogs and cats with mutilated tails not unfrequently propagate the casual deficiency.

"There is a very peculiar variety of the sheep kind given in the Philosophical Transactions for 1813, by Colonel Humphreys

of America, and which the American naturalists have called, from its bowed or elbowy legs, ovis ancon: but the common people the "otter-breed," from its resemblance to the general form of the otter, and a rumour that it was at first produced by an unnatural intercourse between individuals of the two distinct kinds. Its size is small; the full weight being about 45lb. with loose articulations, crooked fore-legs, and great feebleness of power; whence it walks with difficulty, and is therefore quiet, and not fond of rambling. Accident seems to have produced this kind first, but the form has been most correctly preserved in the progeny; and so tenaciously, that if a common sheep and ancon sheep of either sex unite, the young will be either a perfect ancon, or have no trace of it; and if two are lambed at the same time, and one be of one variety and the other of the other, each is found to be perfect in its way, without any amalgamation.

"In like manner, in all probability, from some primary accident resulted the peculiar shape of the head and face in most nations as well as in most families; and hence too those enormous prominences on the hinder parts of one or two of the nations at the back of the Cape of Good Hope, of which an instance was not long since exhibited in this country with some degree of outrage on moral feeling.

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Man, then, is not the only animal in which such variations of form and feature occur; nor the animal in which they occur either most frequently or in the most extraordinary and extravagant manner.

"M. Blumenbach, who has pursued this interesting subject with a liveliness the most entertaining, and a chain of argument the most convincing, has selected the swine genus from among many other quadrupeds that would have answered as well, especially the dog and the sheep, in order to institute a comparison of this very kind; and he has completely succeeded in shewing that the swine, even in countries where we have historical and undeniable proofs, as especially in America, of its being derived from one common and imported stock, exhibits, in its different

varieties, distinctions not only as numerous and astonishing, but, so far as relates to the exterior frame, of the very same kind as are to be met with in the different varieties of the human species.

"In regard to size, the Cuba swine, well known, as he observes, to have been imported into that island from Europe, are at the present day double the height and magnitude of the stock from which they were bred. Whence we may well laugh at every argument in favour of more than one human stock or species drawn from the difference of stature in different nations of man. In regard to colour, they display at least as great a diversity. In Piedmont the swine are black; in Bavaria reddish-brown; in Normandy white. Human hair, observes M. Blumenbach, is somewhat different from swine's bristles; yet in the present point of view they may be compared with each other. Fair hair is soft, and of a silky texture; black hair is coarser, and often woolly. In like manner, among the white swine in Normandy, the bristles on the body are longer and softer than among other swine; and even those on the back, which are usually stouter than the rest, are flaccid, and cannot be employed by the brushmakers.

"The whole difference between the cranium of a Negro and that of an European is in no respect greater than that which exists between the cranium of the wild boar and that of the domestic swine. Those who are in possession of Daubenton's drawings of the two, must be sensible of this, the first moment they compare them together. The peculiarity among the Hindus of having the bone of the leg remarkably long, meets a precise parallel in the swine of Normandy, which stand so high on their hind quarters, that the back forms an inclined plane to the head; and as the head itself partakes of the same direction, the snout is but a little removed from the ground.

"In some countries, indeed, the swine have degenerated into races that in singularity far exceed the most extravagant variations that have been found among the human species. What

can differ more widely than a cloven foot and a solid hoof? Yet swine are found with both; the variety with a solid hoof was known to the ancients, and still exists in Hungary and Sweden; and even the common sort, that were carried by the Spaniards to the isle of Cuba in 1509, have since degenerated into a variety with a hoof of the same solid kind, and of the enormous size of not less than half a span in diameter.

"How absurd, then, to contend that the distinctions in the different varieties of the human race must have proceeded from a plurality of species, while we are compelled to admit that distinctions of a similar kind, but more numerous and more extravagant, have proceeded from a single species in other animals.

"It may appear singular, perhaps, that I have taken no notice of the wide difference which is supposed to exist in the intellectual faculties of the different species of man. To confess the truth, I have purposely omitted it, because of all the arguments. that have ever been offered to support the doctrine of different species, this appears to me the feeblest and most superficial. It may suit the narrow purpose of a slave merchant-of a trafficker in human nerves and muscles-of a wretch, who, in equal defiance of the feelings and the laws of the day, has the impudence to offer for sale, on the polluted shores of our own country, in one and the same lot, as was the case not long since, a dead cameleopard and a living Hottentot woman:-it may suit their purpose to introduce such a distinction into their creed, and to let it constitute the whole of their creed, but it is a distinction too trifling and evanescent to claim the notice of a physiologist for a moment.

"The variable talents of the mind are as propagable as the variable features of the body,-how, or by what means, we know not, but the fact is incontrovertible. Wit and dulness, genius and idiotism, run in direct streams from generation to generation; and hence the moral character of families, of tribes, of whole nations. The understanding of the Negro race, it is admitted, is in many tribes strikingly and habitually obtuse. It has thus,