82 THE MISMEASURE OF MANvirtue; for people, free to choose, gravitate naturally toward the
climates of their original homeland. The black species, created for
hot and humid conditions, will prevail in the Southern lowlands,
though whites will maintain dominion over the seashore and ele-
vated ground. The new South will contain some Negro states. We
should bow before this necessity and admit them into the Union;
we have, after all, already recognized both "Haity and Liberia."*
But the bracing North is not a congenial home for carefree and
lackadaisical people, created for warmer regions. Pure blacks will
migrate South, leaving a stubborn residue to dwindle and die out
in the North: "I hope it may gradually die out in the north where
it has only an artificial foothold" (11 August 1863). As for the
mulattoes, "their sickly physique and their impaired fecundity"
should assure their demise once the shackles of slavery no longer
provide an opportunity for unnatural interbreeding.
Agassiz's world collapsed during the last decade of his life. His
students rebelled; his supporters defected. He remained a hero to
the public, but scientists began to regard him as a rigid and aging
dogmatist, standing firm in his antiquated beliefs before the Dar-
winian tide. But his social preferences for racial segregation pre-
vailed—all the more because his fanciful hope for voluntary
geographic separation did not.Samuel George Morton—empiricist of polygeny
Agassiz did not spend all his time in Philadelphia reviling black
waiters. In the same letter to his mother, he wrote in glowing terms
of his visit to the anatomical collection of Philadelphia's distin-
guished scientist and physician Samuel George Morton: "Imagine
a series of 600 skulls, most of Indians from all tribes who inhabit
or once inhabited all of America. Nothing like it exists anywhere
else. This collection, by itself, is worth a trip to America" (Agassiz
to his mother, December 1846, translated from the original letter
in Houghton Library, Harvard University).*Not all detractors of blacks were so generous. E. D. Cope, who feared that misce-
genation would block the path to heaven (see preceding footnote), advocated the
return of all blacks to Africa (1890, p. 2053): "Have we not burdens enough to carry-
in the European peasantry which we are called on every year to receive and assimi-
late? Is our own race on a plane sufficiently high, to render it safe for us to carry
eight millions of dead material in the very center of our vital organism?"