2. All physiologists agree that species cannot breed with species. Darwin himself laid it down as a fundamental principle. If then the palaeolithic and neolithic types represented separate species, they would be found to remain distinct through all time. This is not the case. There is evidence that extreme dolichocephaly continued into neolithic times, and was only slowly modified into brachycephaly. In the neolithic caves of Italy, Austria, Belgium, and the barrows of Great Britain, skulls of all types are found. The later cave-dwellers and early dolmen builders of Europe were at first long-headed, then of medium type, and finally in some places exclusively round-headed. In England the round-heads appear to be synchronous with the metal age, as shown by the contents of the barrows, and, as on the continental mainland, the two types gradually blended. Permanent fertility between them in prehistoric Europe is thus proved. And this is the case throughout the habitable globe. An examination of the osseous remains of American man supports the view that the human species has not varied since quaternary times. The palaeolithic type is to be found among modern European populations. Certain skulls from South Australia seem cast in almost the same mould as the Neanderthal. After thousands of years nearly pure descendants of quaternary man are found among living races. And man's mutual fertility in prehistoric is repeated throughout historic times: strict racial purity is almost unknown. Thus the unity of the species man is proved by the test of fertility.

3. The works of early man everywhere present the most startling resemblance. The palaeolithic implements all over the globe are all of one pattern. "The implements in distant lands," writes Sir J. Evans, "are so identical in form and character with the British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the same hands.... On the banks of the Nile, many hundreds of feet above its present level, implements of the European types have been discovered; while in Somaliland, in an ancient river-valley at a great elevation above the sea, Sir H.W. Seton-Karr has collected a large number of implements formed of flint and quartzite, which, judging from their form and character, might have been dug out of the drift-deposits of the Somme and the Seine, the Thames or the ancient Solent." This identity in the earliest arts is repeated in the later stages of man's culture; his arts and crafts, his manners and customs, exhibit a similarity so close as to compel the presumption that all the races are but divisions of one family. But perhaps the greatest psychical proof of man's specific unity is his common possession of language. Theodore Waitz writes: "Inasmuch as the possession of a language of regular grammatical structure forms a fixed barrier between man and brute, it establishes at the same time a near relationship between all people in psychical respects.... In the presence of this common feature of the human mind, all other differences lose their import" (_Anthropology_, p. 273). As Dr J.C. Prichard urged, "the same inward and mental nature is to be recognized in all races of men. When we compare this fact with the observations, fully established, as to the specific instincts and separate psychical endowments of all the distinct tribes of sentient beings in the Universe we are entitled to draw confidently the conclusion that all human races are of one species and one family." It has been argued that stock languages imply stock races, but this assumption is untenable. There are some fifty irreducible stock languages in the United States and Canada, yet, taking into consideration the physical and moral homogeneity of the American Indian races, he would be a reckless theorist who held that there were therefore fifty separate human species. If it were so, how have they descended? There are no anthropoid apes in America, none of the ape family higher than the Cebidae, from which it is impossible to trace men. Again, in Australia there is certainly one stock language, yet there are not even Cebidae. In Caucasia, there are many distinct forms of speech, yet all the peoples belong to the Caucasic division of mankind.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 9, Slice 8 — Part 12