.. It furnishes a subject for every observer of
nature to attend to; every fact," he observes, "will make either for or
against it, and it thus serves both as an incitement to the collection
of facts, and an object to which they can be applied when collected.
Many eminent writers support the theory of the progressive development
of animals and plants. There is a very philosophical work bearing
directly on the question--Lawrence's 'Lectures on Man'.... The great
object of these 'Lectures' is to illustrate the different races of
mankind, and the manner in which they probably originated, and he
arrives at the conclusion (as also does Prichard in his work on the
'Physical History of Man') that the varieties of the human race have not
been produced by any external causes, but are due to the development of
certain distinctive peculiarities in some individuals which have
thereafter become propagated through an entire race. Now, I should say
that a permanent peculiarity not produced by external causes is a
characteristic of 'species' and not of mere 'variety,' and thus, if the
theory of the 'Vestiges' is accepted, the Negro, the Red Indian, and the
European are distinct species of the genus Homo.
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