Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/20

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THE NEGRO

number of established facts, is absolutely overwhelming. As a whole, as well as in part, it has passed through the test crucible of time; at each step in its history its refinement has been secured through the most intense fire in the furnace of criticism; and, finally, clothed in truth we now have the solution of this long-debated question in our possession, and settled forever. The comments of the ignorant upon the finding of science in this matter are no longer regarded by the intelligent among us; the fire, the protest, and the ridicule of theology that followed this investigation, step by step, throughout its entire course from its birth to its final decision, has died out and been suspended. Science no longer heeds the feeble and dogmatic expostulations that emanate from any such direction; she has more inportant things to do. Man's place in nature is now as thoroughly known and established as is the fact that the earth is enveloped in the sea of its own atmosphere. And it was by no means altogether through the pen, the brains, and the philosophy of Charles Darwin that science was enabled to arrive at the truth of the question — and, as for the matter of that, his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, years before him had foreshadowed the finding (The Temple of Nature, 1804, pp, 67, 68). This finding has been the outcome of the labor and investigation of a great army of workers,— the minds, the scalpels, the microscopes, and the pens of the individual researchers of which have each and all, directly or indirectly, knowingly or unconsciously, contributed to the result. As an anthropological fact it has passed out of the realm of mere hypothesis into the full blaze of established fact. A rational writer at the present day, in touching