Part 16

The Fuegians are generally quoted as among the most miserable of savages. Though exposed to a damp and cold climate and always insufficiently nourished, they wear scarcely any clothing, and are content with wretched huts of branches and weeds. They have long skulls (about 75), long, narrow eyes, well-shaped noses, and generally are good specimens of one of the American types. Their language is eminently polysynthetic and rich in terms to express the objects and incidents of their daily life.

_7. The South Pacific Group._

The principal nations in the South Pacific group are the Chibchas and the Qquichuas.

The former, called also Muyscas, resided near the Magdalena River, near the present city of Bogota. They were sedentary, agricultural, and skilful in a number of arts. Their agriculture extended to maize, potatoes, cotton, yucca and other vegetables, and their fields were irrigated by canals. As potters and goldsmiths they ranked among the finest on the continent, and both for symmetry of form and richness of decoration some of the vases from their district cannot be surpassed from American products.

The most powerful and cultivated of the South American nations were the Qquichuas of Peru. Originally they were a small tribe near Lake Titicaca, where they dwelt in close relations to the Aymaras. About 1000 A. D., their chief, Manco Capac, conquered the valleys to the north and founded the city of Cuzco. His successors added to the territory of the state until it extended from a few degrees north of the equator to about 20° south latitude, or a distance along the coast of over 1500 miles. In width it varied from 200 to 400 miles. Of course it embraced a variety of distinct stocks, so that it is impossible to speak of any “Peruvian” type of skull or features, the less so as it was the policy of the Incas, as the rulers were called, to remove conquered tribes to distant parts of the realm.

The social organization of Peru rested upon the political union of clans or gentes, as it did in most other American nations. The ruler of the realm acted in accordance with the advice of the council elected by the gentes, but also exercised at times an autocratic power, and it would be an error to consider him not more independent than the war-chief of one of the hunting tribes. The office was hereditary in the female line, provided a satisfactory candidate appeared; otherwise it was elective.[195]

No American nation surpassed the Peruvians in agricultural arts. Maize, cotton, coca, potatoes, and tobacco were the principal crops. As the arable land in the narrow vales of their country was limited, they increased its extent by constructing terraces along the mountain sides, and to guard against the aridity, numerous dams were built, from which canals carried the water for miles to the various fields. Fertilizers were dug into the soil, and a rotation of crops observed to prevent its exhaustion. The domestication of animals had advanced further in Peru than elsewhere on the continent. Besides the dog, and a fowl like a goose, they had large herds of lamas, an animal they used for food and also for carrying burdens, though its chief value was its wool. This was spun and woven into articles of clothing, mats, etc. Quantities of cloth from this substance and from cotton are exhumed from the ancient tombs. The specimens are often in good preservation, showing geometrical designs worked with symmetry, and dyed of various bright colors.

In the mountain regions the houses were generally of stone, and in the arid coast lands, of sun-dried bricks. They were located in groups surrounded by walls, also of stone or brick. The stones were sometimes fitted together with extraordinary nicety, or elsewhere were united with mortar or cement. Recent travellers have stated that the stone-work on some of the ruins of the Inca palaces is equal to that in any part of the world; this is especially true of the mysterious ruins of Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca, where some of the most complete work on the continent is to be found.

These architects had not discovered the pointed arch, as had the Mayas, and in the details of their structures, as in the forms of their doors and the perfect simplicity of their walls, it is clearly seen that they had no connection with the northern civilizations. The structures were rarely erected on pyramids or mounds, and frequently were of several stories in height.

Their skill in the reduction and manufacture of various metals excited the admiration of the Europeans. Among the articles they offered the Spaniards were utensils, both solid and hollow, of gold, imitations of fruits and animals of the same substance, golden butterflies, idols, birds, masks, and mace-heads. Groups of half a dozen figures in various attitudes have been found of solid silver, the symmetry and expression being well preserved.

There was a like exuberance in the forms they gave their pottery. The jars and vases were imitations of every kind of object around them--fish, birds, reptiles, fruits, men, houses. Often the product is so symmetrical that one is tempted to believe it was formed by a potter’s wheel; but this invention, so ancient in the old world, was never known to the American Race. Curious ingenuity is displayed in the production of whistling or musical jars, which will emit a note when the fluid is poured in; or trick-jars, which cannot be emptied unless turned in a certain direction, not at first obvious. The art of glazing was not known, and most of the pottery seems to have been sun-dried only.

With the materialistic notions of religion and of a future life which they entertained, it was regarded of the utmost importance that the body should be preserved undisturbed in the tomb. Hence it was often carefully mummified, and the sepulchres were selected in the most secret and inaccesible location, either a cave on the side of a precipice, or if in the plains the grave was levelled, so that no sign of it appeared on the surface.

South of the Peruvian monarchy were the Araucanians, occupying the area of the modern state of Chili. They were a warlike, hunting race, physically and also linguistically akin to the tribes of the Pampas. Neither the Incas nor the Spaniards succeeded in reducing their indomitable spirit. In culture they had gained an advantage over the Pampean tribes by their relations to the Qquichuas, but were far behind the latter in general aptitude in the arts. Much of their subsistence was dependent on the chase, and they are not classed among the partly civilized natives of the continent. They are described as tall and robust, the skull brachycephalic, the face round, the nose short and rather flattened.

LECTURE X.

PROBLEMS AND PREDICTIONS.

CONTENTS.--I. ETHNOGRAPHIC PROBLEMS. 1. The problem of acclimation. Various answers. Europeans in the tropics. Austafricans in cold climates; in warm climates. The Asian race. Tolerance of the American race. Theories of acclimation. Conclusion. 2. The problem of amalgamation. Effect on offspring. Mingling of white and black races. Infertility. Mingling of colored races. Influence of early and present social conditions. Is amalgamation desirable? As applied to white race; to colored races. 3. The problem of civilization. Urgency of the problem. Influence of civilization on savages. Failure of missionary efforts. Cause of the failure. Suggestions.

II. THE DESTINY OF RACES. Extinction of Races. The American race. Are the Indians dying out? Conflicting statements. They are perishing. Diminution of insular peoples; causes of fatality. The Austafrican race. The Mongolian race stationary. Wonderful growth of the Eurafrican race. Influence of the Semitic element. The future Aryo-Semitic race.

Relation of ethnography to historical and political science.

The population of the world in this year of 1890 is estimated at over fifteen hundred millions. This vast multitude have passed in review before us in their races, peoples and nations. What is the future of these jostling millions, each individual of whom is striving after some goal, seeking to satisfy some desire?

This momentous question depends directly on the solution of certain problems with which the ethnographer especially has to deal. On the right reading of these problems rests the destiny of races, and on the destiny of races hangs the fate of Man. We shall do well therefore to take home from the study of this science the horoscope it forecasts.

The first of these inquiries is

_The Problem of Acclimation._

How far can the various races not merely support and live through, but do good work in the varied climates of the world?

Never was this question so urgent as to-day. With fleets of steamships ploughing every ocean, and the iron horse racing on its steel track over every continent, the movement of men is conducted in such masses and with such rapidity that the most extensive migrations of nations of other ages seem insignificant in comparison.

Like many other questions in ethnography, this one has been answered very variously, too often, evidently, by writers influenced by other motives than a single desire to reach the truth. It has been in close proximity to political and social movements, and facts have been twisted to serve the purposes of advocates.

The facts, indeed, are easily liable to misinterpretation. Take the white race, for instance. It has for centuries possessed flourishing colonies not only in the southern temperate zone, which would not surprise us, but under the torrid suns of India, Mexico and Brazil, in Java and the Isle of France, in the West and East Indies, not to speak of the Hamitic tribes, who thousands of years ago established themselves on the borders of the Sudan (see above, p. 116). Long before that, the Indo-Aryans had crossed the Hindu Kush and extended their sway over the Dravidian peoples of Hindostan.

But in these tropical regions have they not merely existed, but also prospered? Have they retained, along with the purity of their blood, also their fecundity, their viability and their energy? I must reply emphatically, No. In the words of a medical observer of ample experience in the tropics--“The changes which a torrid climate impresses upon the constitution of Europeans and upon their descendants are pathological, and tend with fatal certainty to the extinction of the race.”[196] In India the children of English parents must be sent back to Great Britain or they will perish. It is said that in the history of the civil service there has not been a single family which survived three generations. Even the first generation loses the energy which characterizes the parental stock. The whites nowhere in the tropics can undergo continuous physical toil exposed to the sun. They are always found subsisting on the labor of the native races.

The Spanish and Portuguese population of tropical America have survived in their new home for nearly four hundred years. But when have they displayed the astonishing energy of the early _Conquistadores_? Many of the so-called Spanish creoles are really of mixed blood. In Peru and Mexico it is hard to find a family without the strain of another race in its pedigree. In Cuba, where there has been the least exposure to this result, owing to the prompt extinction of the natives, the descendants of the early European immigrants are enfeebled and infertile. While in Mexico, in Guatemala, and in Yucatan, the men of prominent energy are either of mixed blood or, like the late Governor Barrios, are of the once conquered, the pure American race. I do not call a race acclimated which merely manages to exist, at the sacrifice of those qualities which are its highest claim to distinction.

On the other hand, the black race finds it hopeless to struggle with the climate above the fortieth parallel of latitude. In no portion of Southern Europe did it ever maintain itself, and when its members were carried in numbers as slaves to Mauritius and Ceylon, they succumbed to the change.[197] Even in Africa it is doubtful if it ever effected a permanent settlement on the shores of the Mediterranean. Pulmonary diseases and scrofula are the chief morbid changes which destroy its emigrants.

In the West Indies and generally in tropical and sub-tropical America they seem to flourish. In the United States the “colored people” increase by birth more rapidly in proportion than the whites, though this calculation includes the mulattoes and others of mixed blood.

Whether the Asian race has greater or less powers of acclimation than others is a question of much significance at present, when the teeming millions of the Celestial empire seem ready to pour forth in resistless floods over the whole earth. We are not prepared to reply. The subjection of this race to foreign climatic influences has been too recent and under conditions too exceptional to furnish the requisite data; and in their own land, the Chinese, from whom we look for the most portentous migrations, have lived in a country which does not present contrasts equal to those of the various zones.

The American race may be regarded as an exception to the others. The area it always occupied extended from one polar circle to the other, including every degree of altitude, and every extreme of temperature to which man is exposed. No difference in the viability or the energy of its members in various parts of the continent can be noted. The most remarkable monuments of its toilsome industry were completed under the tropical sun of Yucatan; while one of the most ingenious of its tribes lived the farthest north of any human beings. The physical energy of the stalwart Patagonian is not superior to that of the active Carib or the northern Algonkin. We may possibly find the explanation of this in the trend of the chief mountains and rivers of the continent, which facilitated easy progress from north to south, while in the eastern hemisphere the trend running parallel with the latitude, separated the early peoples into smaller climatic areas.

While the facts so far as ascertained seem to point to the decision that each race is confined to climatic conditions similar to that of its original area of characterization, the theory has been advanced that this is but for a time, that by persistence and repeated sacrifices of the unfit, finally a remnant will survive fully able to face the novel trials of the climatic change.[198]

This, however, is a theory only. It may be allowed credence to the extent that the survival of a remnant is possible; but it would be at the sacrifice of the distinctive qualities of the higher races; those can flourish only under the physical conditions which gave them birth.

It has also been urged that the improved sanitary hygienic science of modern times will do efficient battle against the lethal influences of strange climes. Doubtless in individual cases such precautions are of the highest value; they aid the system in withstanding malarial and zymotic poisons; but the best of them, employed on the widest scale, will prove sadly inadequate, as is shown by their failure in many a tract in the temperate zone. If we cannot restore salubrity to the Roman Campagna, or to Staten Island in New York Harbor, it is more than wild to talk of rendering healthful the Congo Basin.

I am tempted, therefore, to consider this problem of acclimation insoluble, and to express myself in the words of the learned physician I have already quoted, “There is no such thing as acclimation. A race never was acclimated, and in the present condition of the world, a race never can become acclimated.”[199]

The second of our inquiries relates to

_The Problem of Amalgamation_

--that which the French call _métissage_ and the Americans _miscegenation_. The fact that we have manufactured this “recent and ill-formed word,” as Webster’s _Unabridged_ calls it, is evidence that the questions involved in this problem touch us nearly. They touch the whole world, and very closely. I know of nothing within the range of human power to control, more decisive of the future prosperity or failure of the human species than this of the effect of race-intermarriage.

The consequences of such blendings may be studied with reference to the viability of the offspring, their mental faculties, and their fecundity.

At the outset it is important to premise that the question cannot be treated as simple and single. It is complex. The results of race-crossings differ with races and with evironment. The law that applies to one case in one place is not certainly good in other cases and elsewhere.

It seems, for instance, tolerably certain that the cross between the white and black races produces offspring (mulattoes) who are deficient in physical vigor. It is well ascertained in the United States that they are peculiarly prone to scrofula and consumption, unable to bear hard work, and shorter lived than either the full black or the white. This is not owing to our climate, as the same results are recognized by the negroes of the Gold Coast, who for four hundred years have been in constant contact with the whites.[200] In the West India Islands, the mulattoes must be constantly reinforced by new crossings, or they disappear.

The fertility of such unions, though generally equal if the number of births alone is considered, is really less on account of the greater mortality of the infants. As a rule, the third generation of descendants of a marriage between the white and the Polynesian, Australian or Dravidian, become extinct through short lives, feeble constitutions or sterility. According to one writer, except a few small islands in the Pacific, there is not an instance of a modern population of mixed white blood, living by itself, which is not on the road to extinction.[201]

It is not certain that this applies either to the crossing of the Eurafrican or the African with the American race. The half-breed between the negro and the Indian, of which we have examples in the Cafusos of Brazil, the Zambos of Paraguay, the Chinos of Peru, and the “Black Caribs” of St. Vincent, are said to be finely formed and vigorous. Throughout Mexico, Central and South America, there has been a blending of the white and red races on an enormous scale, and the result has been that both physically and mentally this mixed race has repeatedly taken precedence in political and social life over the pure descendants of the European colonists. It is well-known that the half-breeds of our frontiers, of British America and of Greenland, are singularly hardy, intelligent and vigorous scouts, guides, hunters and soldiers. Not a few of them have distinguished themselves in our colleges, and later in clerical and political life.

It would appear also that in the earlier conditions of social life, no such debility attended the crossing of the Eurafrican and African race as seems at present to be the case. The only physiological explanation which can be offered of the numerous negroid tribes of eastern and southern Africa, is that they are the descendants of prolonged and intimate unions between the pure negroes and members of the Hamitic and Semitic divisions of the white race (see above, p. 185). This permits the suggestion that there are special causes now at work which alter the influences of race-mixture from what they once were.

Some of them are patent. In modern times it is an almost universal law that all mixed-white populations derive their white blood exclusively from the father, their dark blood exclusively from the mother. I do not know that I can tell you precisely what effect this would have,[202] but it is certain that such a divergence from what is customary within the race limits would exert a decided influence both physically and socially. It is generally believed among students of heredity that the psychical qualities are inherited more from the mother, the physical more from the father; and if this holds good in most cases, we should expect the children of such unions to be intellectually inferior to the average of their parents. This I think is true. Advocates of miscegenation, such as de Quatrefages, Serres and others, are apt to draw a different conclusion, because they compare the average intellectual ability of the products of such unions with the average of the lower race, and this is certainly in favor of the mixed stock, but is an unscientific procedure.

It is also true that in perhaps ninety per cent. of the cases, these mixed unions are illegal, and the children suffer under the stigma of illegitimacy. This means more or less deficiency in home training, education, legal protection, and social recognition. In primitive conditions this was not the case, and hence race minglings at that time were under far more favorable auspices.

In most modern communities the prejudice against members or partial members of the dark races forces them to rest content with unequal advantages, if not educational, at least social, and the recognition of these invisible barriers must necessarily have a deteriorating influence on ambition. This of course was not the case in primitive society, where no other power was recognized than that of the strong right arm.

The possibility of a vigorous and fertile cross-race under certain conditions seems therefore to have been demonstrated by the past history of the species. Is it a desirable result in itself? May we look forward to the commingling of races as worth the fostering care of states and societies? The question bristles with difficulties--moral, not physical difficulties.

There can be no doubt but that any white mixed race is lower in the scale of intelligence than the pure white race. A white man entails indelible degradation on his descendants who takes in marriage a woman of a darker race; and any relation other than that of marriage, no matter if it does lift the lower race, is unauthorized by any sound moral code. Still more to be deplored is the woman of the white race who unites herself with a man of a lower ethnic type. It cannot be too often repeated, too emphatically urged, that it is to the women alone of the highest race that we must look to preserve the purity of the type, and with it the claims of the race to be the highest. They have no holier duty, no more sacred mission, than that of transmitting in its integrity the heritage of ethnic endowment gained by the race through thousands of generations of struggle. That philanthropy is false, that religion is rotten, which would sanction a white woman enduring the embrace of a colored man.

The two problems we have now discussed seem to present a dilemma. The pure races do not flourish out of their physiological surroundings; and yet some of them are not adequate for the work required by modern culture. What resource have we? The answer is, in the union of the lower races among themselves, especially the Mongolian and the African. Thus we may expect a blending capable of resisting the heat of the tropics, and intelligent enough to carry out the directions of that race which will ever and everywhere maintain its supremacy so long as it maintains its ethnic purity--the Eurafrican.

Let us now turn to

_The Problem of Civilization._