No. 157.

VOL. VII.

LECTURES

INTRODUCTORY TO THE COURSE OF THE INSTITUTES OF MEDICINE,

DELIVERED BY

ROBERT J. GRAVES, M.D., King's Professor, Dublin.

LECTURE VIII.

GENTLEMEN,-At our last meeting we diseussed the nature of that innate tendency displayed by mankind to become affected by a common impulse, a tendency which we called the instinct of imitation, and which has often given rise to events the most important.

At the commencement of the Christian era a monomania of migration appears to have seized the nomade tribes residing in the northeastern parts of Europe and the west of Asia, and gave rise to those successive inundations of warlike hordes, which, for the time, nearly extinguished civilisation in the countries they invaded, but proved finally the means of giving birth to those principles of civil and religious freedom that now prevail in European society. No nation has suffered more from the sudden working of this passion than the Jews, whose history in Germany, France, Spain, and England exhibits so many intervals of repose, interrupted by violent persecutions carried on by the frantic populace with all the symptoms of temporary insanity. When accident, or the wickedness of some malicious person, had succeeded in producing a persecution of the Jews in any one city, the effect of this example was often sufficient to arouse the dormant passions of the rest of Christendom, and the persecution speedily became general. Shortly after the successful voyages of Columbus, in search of the New World, all the maritime nations of Europe were seized with a mania of discovery, and the dreams of society were every where gilded with the wealth of unknown regions, with the treasures of Eldorado. This passion ruined thousands it is true, but the enthusiasm it generated enabled man to overcome difficulties to all appearance VOL. VII.

insurmountable, and, in a comparatively short space of time, he was rewarded with a knowledge of geography, the enlightened parent of commerce. I need not remind you, gentlemen, of those periods of history when the votaries of astrology and alchemy successively forged chains, in which society was led away captive, neither is it necessary to advert to the lasting effects produced by the passing mania of knight-errantry; all these subjects have been treated of fully by authors of ability.

As communication improves by means of steam-vessels, rail-roads, and other contrivances, the brilliant results of the mechanical genius of the age, society will be placed in a situation still more liable to the influence of this instinct, a circumstance imperatively demanding the consideration of those whose duty it is to frame laws for the government of mankind. Formerly the inhabitants of any particular shire, or district, were almost insulated, and held little intercourse with the rest of their countrymen, and consequently very different feelings, customs, and opinions prevailed in the different parts of the same nation, and served together, with difference of dialect and accent, to prevent the origin of a common sympathy. Trifling as the circumstance may appear, there can be little doubt that the difference of costume, which was then observable in each county, served to render the line of demarcation still stronger. Society, thus subdivided into a great number of distinct parts, was not, except on extraordinary occasions, liable to be affected by one common impulse. This state of things no longer exists; the tendency of modern improvement has been to remove the impediments which separated one part of the population from another, its effects have fused all into one common mass; nations are now more closely connected, and maintain a more frequent, rapid, and perfect intercourse with each other than formerly existed between different subdivisions of the same kingdom. In consequence of this change, as yet by no means fully accomplished, man is fast approaching to a state, in which the heaving of the public mind, no longer confined by the limits of a district, or the boundaries of a nation, will spread with rapidity from people to people,

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18 MAR1924

acquiring in its course force, magnitude, and buoyancy, and rolling onward an ocean wave from hemisphere to hemisphere. Raised by the storm of social agitation in the New World, already has it traversed the deep, and precipitated itself on France, has prostrated the most venerable institutions, the most stable monuments of the old; already, reflected back across the Atlantic, has it broken on the shores of South America, shaking, as it fell, the very foundations of that mighty Continent.

The workings of the instinct of imitation are extremely varied, and comprise all those different impressions which suddenly, and unaided by the exercise of the judgment, infect any numerous body of individuals. The panics that have so often arisen in the best disciplined armies must be thus accounted for. The well known sauve qui peut," which hastened the final catastrophe of the hard fought field of Waterloo, is not without a parallel in the annals of the British army. Napier, in his admirable history of the War in the Peninsula", records a remarkable instance of a panic in that division of our army which, above all others, was distinguished for valour and discipline:

"On the 22nd Sept. 1810, General Pack destroyed the bridges over the Criz, and fell back upon the light division, but on the 23rd the enemy re-established the communication, passed the river, and obliged the British horse to quit the plain and take to the hills behind Montagao. Three squadrons of light and one of heavy cavalry were retained there by Lord Wellington, but the rest he sent over the Sierra de Busaco to the low country, about Milhadra, whence he recalled Spencer, and, at the same time, caused the third and fourth divisions to take their ground on the position of the former, at St. Antonio de Cantara, the latter at the convent; the light division, falling back only a league, then encamped in a wood, where happened one of those extraordinary panics that in ancient times were attributed to the influence of a hostile god. No enemy was near, no alarm was given, yet suddenly the troops, as if seized with a frenzy, were startled from sleep and dispersed in every direction, nor was there any possibility of allaying this strange terror until some persons called out that the enemy's cavalry were amongst them, when the soldiers mechanically ran together in masses, and the illusion was instantly dissipated."

The following, related by Southey, in his Peninsular War t, strikingly illustrates the effects produced on animals by an union of acquired discipline and the instinct of imitation. It occurred on the embarkation of the Spaniards under the Marquis de la Romana :

"Two of the regiments were cavalry, mounted on fine, black, long-tailed Andalusian

* Vol. III. c. vii. p. 327. † Vol. II. p. 345.

horses; these, about one thousand one hundred in number, it was impracticable to bring off, and Romana was not a man who could order them to be destroyed lest they should fall into the hands of the French. He was fond of horses himself, and knew that every man was attached to the beast which had carried him so far and so faithfully. Their bridles, therefore, were taken off, and they were turned loose upon the beach. As they moved off they passed some of the country horses and mares, which were feeding at a little distance. A scene ensued such as probably was never before witnessed. The Spanish horses are not mutilated, and they were sensible that they were no longer under any restraint of human power; a general conflict ensued, in which, retaining the discipline they had learnt, they charged each other in squadrons of ten or twenty together; then closely engaged, striking with their fore feet, and biting and tearing each other with the most ferocious rage, and trampling over those which were beaten down, the shore, in the course of a quarter of an hour, was strewn with the dead and disabled. Part of them had been set free on a rising ground at some distance, but they no sooner heard the roar of battle, than they came thundering down over the intermediate hedges, and, catching the contagious madness, plunged into the fight with equal fury. Sublime as the scene was, it was too horrible to be long contemplated, and Romana, in mercy, gave orders for destroying them."

This

I shall now pass to another part of my subject, the varieties of the human race. matter has been so fully discussed by Lawrence and Prichard (whose works I would strongly recommend you to peruse), that very little remains for me to remark.

In the human species we observe very remarkable varieties as to conformation of body, peculiarities of size and form, and particularly with respect to the colour of the hair, eyes, and skin. There is a vast difference in point of colour and appearance between the negro tribes and the inhabitants of England, Germany, and Denmark. You will find that most authors have agreed in dividing the human species into certain races according to some shades of colour which preponderate. Thus we have the fair, comprising the Europeans and Circassian variety; the black, which includes all the negro and negrite tribes; and the copper colour, which prevails in North and South America, a part of Africa, and a portion of China; and, lastly, we have the olive tribes of Asia, including China and the northern parts of Hindostan.

I shall not enter into any detailed descriptions of these tribes; I used formerly to lecture on these subjects more fully, but find I cannot at present spare time for that purpose, and beg leave to refer you to the works already alluded I shall merely mention one fact, also dwelt upon by Dr. Prichard, namely, that none of these tribes constitute a distinct spe

to.

cies; it is much better to call them varieties. We find that all have been for a very great length of time distinct from each other; thus black and red skins have existed from the earliest historical eras. This is proved by the paintings which exist on the walls of the Egyptian temples, in which we observe these two colours carefully distinguished. If we can place credit in the Chinese records, the olive race must also be of great antiquity; and the same must be allowed of the Jews, Greeks, and Persians of the white race.

Some physiologists have contended that where you find any particular race flourishing it is quite in vain to endeavour to plant another there very different in character from the native of the country. Thus, if a country be filled with black aborigines, it is quite useless to attempt to colonise it with whites, and they point to Sierra Leone as an example corroborating their views. They assert that if you take a country inhabited by any intermediate race between the white and black, as, for instance, the red or the olive, you may, with some hopes of success, plant either of the extremes in that country, and they refer to the facility with which both whites and blacks become naturalised to the climate of America. This conclusion has a great appearance of plausibility, but it is not borne out by the fact. At very remote historical eras, various red and black tribes existed in Africa, and they still subsist there, while an addition has been made since the Hegira by the introduction of the white Arabian race; thus at present we have three distinct shades of colour coexisting in Africa. Two of them have been living together from the most remote antiquits, and the white has been settled among them for the last 1100 years.

It is not merely by colour that the different varieties of mankind are distinguished from each other. Most of you are aware that the negro differs from the European not only in the colour of his hair and skin, but also in his skeleton, in the form of his skull, in his spine, his ribs, and his superior and inferior extremities. There can be no doubt that the European has a more highly developed organisation, so far as the skull is concerned, and that its form possesses great advantages over that of the negro. This distinction is quite obvious on a slight inspection of the skulls of each, and you can tell at a glance, by its low and retreating forehead, that this belonged to a negro.

Inasmuch, therefore, as the cranial organs of the white or European race are found to be more fully developed than those of other nations, many authors have been led to the opinion that they possess an intellectual superiority over the rest of their species, and that the history of mankind furnishes ample proof of this assertion. We have already seen what imperfect instruments, and how little calculated to promote the spread of knowledge, many of the languages spoken by the black,

red, and olive races are, and I think it may be fairly questioned, whether this and other accidents of a similar tendency have not contributed to retard the intellectual progress of such nations whose deficiencies we are wont to attribute, not partly to co-operating causes, but entirely to a supposed want of development in the cerebral mass. History informs us that science first dawned upon Egypt, that it was there the first seeds of civilisation were planted, and that it was from Egypt that the science and literature and arts of antiquity were transplanted into Western Asia and Europe. And, what is still more remarkable, there are strong and almost certain proofs that the Egyptians received their learning and their civilisation from the black or Ethiopian race; indeed Mr. Prichard seems to have established this fact beyond contradiction. Here then is a fact contrary to the general opinion, that the European variety has always surpassed the other races in the career of literature and science, The cradle of European literature lay in Greece, which, it has been fully proved, derived the greater part of its learning from Egypt, and this in its turn from the black tribes inhabiting Ethiopia. It should also be remembered, that literature and science in China were for many centuries in a far more advanced state than they were at the same periods among the European nations.

I may observe, that with respect to the black and white varicties of mankind, the habits which distinguish them are, like their colour, hereditary. Thus it might be supposed that the children of European parents, born in a warm climate, from being habituated to it from the moment of birth, would be far better able to bear it than their parents. Such, however, is not the fact. The children of English, French, and Irish parents bear a warm climate very badly; they languish during infancy, and frequently die before they attain the age of puberty, so that, in order to secure a certain degree of power in the constitution, it is frequently necessary to send them back to Europe. On the other hand, children born in the Indies, and of a stock intermediate between the Hindoo and the European, participate in the qualities of both, being in body as active and healthy as the Hindoo, and in intellect as distinguished as the European. There is no way in which the crossing of breeds has been so successful in producing a vigorous and intellectual race as between the European and the Indian.

It appears that many habits, physical as well as moral, are to a very remarkable extent hereditary; of this I could bring forth numerous instances. The hereditary tendency to certain moral or immoral habits in particular persons has been long known; and it has been frequently remarked that the offspring of such individuals share in the same tendencies, and are exposed to the same dangers in passing through life. The same hereditary resemblance exists also with respect to certain habits of