The Origin of the Races by John Norton Loughborough

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 9, 1876

The Origin of the Races.

By John Norton Loughborough

THE following question has been handed to me with a request that I answer it through the SIGNS OF THE TIMES. “How can the Bible doctrine that all mankind descended from Adam be true, when we see so many varieties and colors of men?” Mr. Horne in his Introduction to the Bible, says: “Difference in color does not invalidate the narrative of Moses, for it has been ascertained that the influence of climate, and the local circumstances of air, water, food, customs, &c., are sufficient to account for the dissimilarity which is discovered in the appearance of different nations. If dogs, taken to the frigid zone, grow shaggy; and if sheep, transported to the torrid zone, exchange their wool for hair, why may not the human species gradually partake of the influence of climate, as experience shows that it does?”

M. De Pages, in his travels around the world, during the years 1767–1771, speaking of his passage over the Great Desert, says: “The tribes which frequent the middle of the desert have locks somewhat crisped, extremely fine, and approaching the wooly hair of the negro. My own, during the short period of my travels in those regions, became more dry and delicate than usual, and, receiving little nourishment, from a checked perspiration, showed a disposition to assume the same frizzled and wooly appearance. An entire failure of moisture, and the excessive heat of climate by which it was occasioned, seemed to be the principal causes of these symptoms. My blood was becoming extremely dry, and my complexion at length differed little from that of a Hindoo or Arab.”—Dr. Eveleigh’s Bampton Lectures, pp. 272, 276.

Count Buffon, an eminent naturalist, an infidel, says: “Man, though white in Europe, black in Africa, yellow in Asia, and red in America, is still the same animal, tinged only with the color of the climate. Where the heat is excessive, as in Guinea and Senegal, the people are perfectly black; where less excessive, as in Abyssinia, the people are less black; where it is more temperate, as in Barbary and Arabia, they are brown; and where mild, as in Europe and lesser Asia, they are fair.”

Mr. Horne says: “In further corroboration of the influence of climate on the human complexion, we may remark, that there is a colony of Jews who have been settled at Cochin on the Malabar coast, from a very remote period, of which they have lost the memory. Though originally a fair people from Palestine, and from their customs preserving themselves unmixed, they are now become as black as the other Malabarians, who are scarcely a shade lighter than the negroes of Guinea, Benin, or Angola. At Ceylon, also, the Portuguese, who settled there only a few centuries ago, are become blacker than the natives, and the Portuguese who settled near the Mundingoes, about three hundred years since, differ so little from them as to be called negroes, which they resent as a high indignity.”

Count Buffon, cited above, says, in concluding his investigation of this subject, “From every circumstance proof may be obtained that mankind are not composed of species essentially different from each other; that, on the contrary, there was originally but one individual species of men, which after being multiplied and diffused over the whole surface of the earth, underwent various changes from the influence of climate, from the difference of food and mode of living, from epidemical disorders, as also from the intermixture varied ad infinitum, of individuals more or less resembling each other; that these alterations were at first less considerable, and confined to individuals; that afterward, from the continued action of the above causes becoming more general, more sensible, and more fixed, they formed varieties of the species, and that these varieties have been and still are perpetuated from generation to generation, in the same manner as certain disorders and certain diseases pass from parents to their children.”—Buffon’s Nat. Hist., vol. i, p. 291.

J. N. LOUGHBOROUGH.