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 agree, though it must be recollected that it is one thing to allow that a given migration is possible, and another to admit there is good reason to believe it has really taken place.

But I can find no sufficient ground for accepting the fourth proposition; and I doubt if it would ever have obtained its general currency except for the circumstance that fair Europeans are very readily tanned and embrowned by the sun.  But I am not aware that there is a particle of proof that the cutaneous change thus effected can become hereditary, any more than that the enlarged livers, which plague our countrymen in India, can be transmitted;—­while there is very strong evidence to the contrary.  Not only, in fact, are there such cases as those of the English families in Barbadoes, who have remained for six generations unaltered in complexion, but which are open to the objection that they may have received infusions of fresh European blood; but there is the broad fact, that not a single indigenous Negro exists either in the great alluvial plains of tropical South America, or in the exposed islands of the Polynesian Archipelago, or among the populations of equatorial Borneo or Sumatra.  No satisfactory explanation of these obvious difficulties has been offered by the advocates of the direct influence of conditions.  And as for the more important modifications observed in the structure of the brain, and in the form of the skull, no one has ever pretended to show in what way they can be effected directly by climate.

It is here, in fact, that the strength of the Polygenists, or those who maintain that men primitively arose, not from one, but from many stocks, lies.  Show us, they say to the Monogenists, a single case in which the characters of a human stock have been essentially modified without its being demonstrable, or, at least, highly probable, that there has been intermixture of blood with some foreign stock.  Bring forward