The fact is proverbial. Do we not see it most fully illustrated in the
royal families and nobility of Europe, where such matrimonial alliances
have’ long been customary ? The reputation of the House of
Lords in England would long since have been extinct, had not the
Crown incessantly manufactured nobles from out of the sturdy sons
of the people. Cannot every one of us individually point to degenerate
offspring which have arisen from family intermarriages for mere
property-sake ?
In early life, I witnessed a most striking example, in the upper
part of South Carolina, where my father owned a country-seat. Almost
the entire population of the neighborhood was made up of Irish
Covenanters, who had moved to that country before the Revolutionary
war. They had intermarried for many generations, until the same
blood coursed through the veins of the whole of them; and there are
many persons now living in South Carolina who will hear me out
when I state, that the proportion of idiots and deformed was unprecedented
in that district, of which the majority in its population was
stupid and debased in the extreme. I could mention several other
striking examples, beheld in higher life, but it would be painful to
particularize.
And do not the instincts of our nature, the social laws of man, all
over the civilized world, and the laws of God, from Genesis to Revelations,
cry aloud against incest 1 Does not the father shrink with
horror from the idea of marrying his own child, or from seeing the
bed of his daughter polluted by her brother ? Do not children themselves
shudder at the thought ? And can it be credited, that a God
of infinite power, wisdom, and foresight, should have been driven to
the necessity of propagating the human family from a single pair,
and then have stultified his act by stamping incest as a crime ?
I do not believe that true religion ever intended to teach a common
origin for the human race. “ Cain knew his wife,” whom he found
in a foreign land, when he had no sister to marry; and although corruption
and sin were not wanting among 'the patriarchs, yet nowhere
in Scripture do we see, after Adam’s .sons and daughters, a brother
marrying his sister.
I t is shown, in our Supplement, that many of the genealogies of
Genesis have been falsely translated, and otherwise misconstrued, in
our English Bible; and that the names of Abraham’s ancestors represent
countries and nations, and not individuals. Moreover, nowhere
in Genesis is the dogma of a future state hinted a t : and its
ancient authors could have had no object in teaching the modern
idea of unity of races, when those writers themselves possessed no
clear perceptions upon “ salvation” hereafter.
In my remarks, five years ago; on “ Universal Terms,” reproduced
and extended in this volume, I showed that the only text in the Hew
Testament which refers directly to the unity of races, is that in Acts,
where S t . P a u l says, that G od “ hath made of one blood all nations
of men.” I hold that no scientific importance should be attached
to this isolated passage, inasmuch as the writer of Acts employed universal
terms very loosely ; at the same time that he knew nothing of
the existence of races or nations beyond the circumference of the
Roman Empire.
Dr. Morton, in one of his letters to me (Sept. 27, 1850), shortly
before his demise, thus emphatically expressed himself: —
“ For iny own part, if I could believe that the human race had its origin in incest, I
should think that I had at once got the clue to all ungodliness. Two lines of Catechism
would explain more than all the theological discussions since the Christian era. I have put
it into rhyme.
“ Q. Whence came that curse we call primeval sin ?
“ A. From Adam’s children breeding in and in.”
The reader can now appreciate some of the contradictory phenomena
that perplex the investigator of human Eylridity. I have
purposely set them before him in juxtaposition. To me they appear
irreconcileable ; unless the theory of plurality of origin be adopted,
together with the recognition that there'exist remote, allied, and proximate,
“ species,” as well of mankind as of lower animals. '
Having speeulatively alluded (supra, p. 80) to a possible extermination
of races in an unknown futurity, I would here briefly justify such
hypothesis by saying, that Mature marches steadily towards perfection
; and that it attains this end through the consecutive destruction
of living beings. Geology and palaeontology prove a succession of
creations and destructions previously to any effacements of Man ; and
it is contended by Hombron and other naturalists, that the inferior
races of mankind were created before the superior types, who now
appear destined to supplant their predecessors. Albeit, whatever
may have been the order of creation, the unintellectual races seem
doomed to eventual disappearance in all those climates where the
higher groups of fair-skinned families can permanently exist.
The entire race of the Guanches, at the Canary Islands, was exterminated
by the Portuguese during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
; not a living vestige remaining to tell the tale. Some of the
pre-Celtic inhabitants of Britain, Gaul, and Scandinavia, seem to have
shared a similar fate: 16,000,000 of aborigines in Uorth America
have dwindled down to 2,000,000 since the “ Mayflower” discharged
on Plymouth Rock ; and their congeners, the Caribs, have long been
extinct in the West Indian islands. The mortal destiny of the whole
American group is already perceived to be running out, like the sand
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