72 THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
Some degenerationists cited their commitments in the name of
human brotherhood. Etienne Serres, a famous French medical
anatomist, wrote in i860 that the perfectability of lower races distin-
guished humans as the only species subject to improvement by its
own efforts. He lambasted polygeny as a "savage theory" that "seems
to lend scientific support to the enslavement of races less advanced
in civilization than the Caucasian":
Their conclusion is that the Negro is no more a white man than a donkey
is a horse or a zebra—a theory put into practice in the United States of
America, to the shame of civilization (i860, pp. 407-408).
Nonetheless, Serres worked to document the signs of inferiority
among lower races. As an anatomist, he sought evidence within his
specialty and confessed to some difficulty in establishing both crite-
ria and data. He settled on the theory of recapitulation—the idea
that higher creatures repeat the adult stages of lower animals during
their own growth (Chapter 4). Adult blacks, he argued, should be
like white children, adult Mongolians like white adolescents. He
searched diligently but devised nothing much better than the dis-
tance between navel and penis—"that ineffaceable sign of embry-
onic life in man." This distance is small relative to body height in
babies of all races. The navel migrates upward during growth, but
attains greater heights in whites than in yellows, and never gets very
far at all in blacks. Blacks remain perpetually like white children and
announce their inferiority thereby.
Polygeny, though less popular, had its illustrious supporters as
well. David Hume did not spend his life absorbed in pure thought.
He held a number of political posts, including the stewardship of the
English colonial office in 1766. Hume advocated both the separate
creation and innate inferiority of nonwhite races:
I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of
men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to
the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than
white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.* No
ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences.... Such a*This "inductive" argument from human cultures is far from dead as a defense of
racism. In his Study of History (1934 edition), Arnold Toynbee wrote: "When we
classify mankind by color, the only one of the primary races, given by this classifica-
tion, which has not made a creative contribution to any of our twenty-one civiliza-
tions is the Black Race" (in Newby, 1969, p. 217).