ho certainly can know nothing of either; for as
there is neither air nor water round the moon, there can be nothing
to grow there, and therefore nothing to cook--and suppose we asked
him to study the series from end to end. Do you not think that the
man in the moon, if he were half as shrewd as Crofton Croker makes
him in his conversation with Daniel O'Rourke, would answer after due
meditation, "How the wheat plant got changed into the loaf I cannot
see from my experience in the moon: but that it has been changed,
and that the two are the same thing I do see, for I see all the
different stages of the change." And so I think you may say of the
wood and the coal.

The man in the moon would be quite reasonable in his conclusion; for
it is a law, a rule, and one which you will have to apply again and
again in the study of natural objects, that however different two
objects may look in some respects, yet if you can find a regular
series of gradations between them, with all shades of likeness, first
to one of them and then to the other, then you have a fair right to
suppose them to be only varieties of the same species, the same kind
of thing, and that, therefore, they have a common origin.

That sounds rather magniloquent. Let me give you a simple example.

Suppose you had come into Britain with Brute, the grandson of AEneas,
at that remote epoch when (as all archaeologists know who have duly
read Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Arthuric legends) Britain was
inhabited only by a few giants. Now if you had met giants with one
head, and also giants with seven heads, and no others, you would have
had a right to say, "There are two breeds of giants here, one-headed
and seven-headed." But if you had found, as Jack the Giant-Killer
(who belongs to the same old cycle of myths) appears to have found,
two-headed giants also, and three-headed, and giants, indeed, with
any reasonable number of heads, would you not have been justified in
saying, "They are all of the same breed, after all; only some are
more capitate, or heady, than others!"

I hope that you agree to that reasoning; for by it I think we arrive
most surely at a belief in the unity of the human race, and that the
Negro is actually a man and a brother.

If the only two types of men in the world were an extreme white type,
like the Norwegians, and an extreme black type, like the Negros, then
there would be fair ground for saying, "These