ve become converted into Negroes, Australians,
Mongolians, &c., within that time. Five-sixths of the public are
taught this Adamitic Monogenism, as if it were an established truth,
and believe it. I do not; and I am not acquainted with any man of
science, or duly instructed person, who does.

A second school of monogenists, not worthy of much attention, attempts
to hold a place midway between the Adamites and a third division, who
take up a purely scientific position, and require to be dealt with
accordingly. This third division, in fact, numbers in its ranks
Linnaeus, Buffon, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Prichard, and many distinguished
living ethnologists.

These "Rational Monogenists," or, at any rate, the more modern among
them, hold, firstly, that the present condition of the earth has
existed for untold ages; secondly, that, at a remote period, beyond
the ken of Archbishop Usher, man was created, somewhere between the
Caucasus and the Hindoo Koosh; thirdly, that he might have migrated
thence to all parts of the inhabited world, seeing that none of them
are unattainable from some other inhabited part, by men provided with
only such means of transport as savages are known to possess and
must have invented; fourthly, that the operation of the existing
diversities of climate and other conditions upon people so migrating,
is sufficient to account for all the diversities of mankind.

Of the truth of the first of these propositions no competent judge now
entertains any doubt. The second is more open to discussion, for in
these latter days many question the special creation of man: and even
if his special creation be granted, there is not a shadow of a reason
why he should have been created in Asia rather than anywhere else.
Of all the odd myths that have arisen in the scientific world, the
"Caucasian mystery," invented quite innocently by Blumenbach, is the
oddest. A Georgian woman's skull was the handsomest in his collection.
Hence it became his model exemplar of human skulls, from which all
others might be regarded as deviations; and out of this, by some
strange intellectual hocus-pocus, grew up the notion that the
Caucasian man is the prototypic "Adamic" man, and his country the
primitive centre of our kind. Perhaps the most curious thing of all
is, that the said Georgian skull, after all, is not a skull of average
form, but distinctly belongs to the brachycephalic group.

With the third proposition I am quite disposed to