Page:Last of the tasmanians.djvu/354

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FECUNDITY OF MIXED RACES.
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capable of having offspring by either White or Black, is to credit public prostitutes with fecundity.

But to the abstract question of the fertility of mixed races the learned have directed our attention, Mr. Brace, in his "Races of the Old World," sees no objection, and instances the families of Mulattoes and Indian half-breeds, and adduces the fact of the Mohawk tribe having only two of the original stock. Dr. E. Dally says, "If cross-breeding in families is necessary, the same thing among races is also necessary; and if crossed families are superior to pure blood, why refuse the same superiority to crossed races?" M. Pouchet adheres to the law that a half type cannot exist by itself. Senor Pacheco declares that there are not eight thousand pure Spanish in the eight million population of Mexico. Dr. Nott, the distinguished ethnologist of the United States, assures us that the Mulattoes are the most short-lived race in the world, and are less capable of fatigue than the present races; that the women are bad breeders, extremely delicate, and very subject to abortions; and that many children die young. Dr. Broca takes a more hopeful view; and, after mentioning the rarity of cross-breeds in Australia, adds: "The fact is so much opposed to the usual theory of interbreeding of human races, that it is worth while to examine whether there may not be other than physiological causes for it." In the elaborate work of Messrs. Hombron and Jacquinot, alluding to the few half-castes of our Southern coloured people, it is written: "This absence of the mixed race between two peoples, living in contact upon the same country, proves very incontestably the difference of species."

With the advocates of non-fertility there is the learned Dr. Knox. Mr. Hyde Clarke believes in the utter extinction of the Turk before long from intermarriage, and says, "It was very rare to see a Mulatto in Turkey, though there were many black children." Professor Agassiz, after telling us of the Mamelucos of Brazil, the offspring of Indian and White, and of the Cafuzo, the children of the Indian and the Negro, proceeds: "My observations upon the cross-breeds in South America have convinced me that the varieties arising from contact between these human species, or so-called races, differ from true species, and that they retain the same liability to revert to the original stock, as is observed among all so-called varieties or breeds."