Pure negroes and negresses, transported from Central Africa to England, and marrying among themselves, would never acquire the characteristics of the Caucasian races; nor would pure Englishmen and Englishwomen, emigrating to Central Africa, and in like manner intermarrying, ever become negroes or negresses. The fact is, that while you don't bleach the color of the dark-skinned African by placing him in London, you bleach the life out of him; and _vice versa_ with the Englishman.**
** "Indigenous Races of the Earth," p. 458. The alleged discovery of white-skinned negroes in Western Africa does not affect this question: it is not only to the color of the skin, but also the general negro characteristics that the above remarks apply.
For a long time there has been ascribed to man the faculty of adapting himself to every climate. The following facts will show the ascription a most erroneous one: "In Egypt the austral negroes are, and the Caucasian Memlooks were, unable to raise up even a third generation; in Corsica French families vanish beneath Italian summers. Where are the descendants of the Romans, the Vandals, or the Greeks in Africa? In Modern Arabia, 1830 years after Mahomed Ali had got clear of the Morea war, 18,000 Arnaots (Albanians) were soon reduced to some 400 men. At Gibraltar, in 1817, a negro regiment was almost annihilated by consumption. In 1841, during the three weeks on the Niger, 130 Europeans out of 145 caught African fever, and 40 died; out of 158 negro sailors only eleven were affected, and not one died. In 1809 the British Expedition to Walchereen failed in the Netherlands through marsh fever. About the same time, in St. Domingo, about 15,000 French soldiers died from malaria. Of 30,000 Frenchmen, only 8,000 survived exposure to that Antillian island; while the Dominicanized African negro, Tous-saint L'Overture, retransported to Europe, was perishing from the chill of his prison in France."
On the third point we again quote Dr. Nott: "The only argument left, then, is that of congenital varieties or peculiarities, which are said to spring up and be transmitted from parent to child, so as to form new races. Let us pause for a moment to illustrate this fanciful idea. The negroes of Africa, for example, are admitted not to be offsets from some other race which have been gradually blackened and changed in a moral and physical type by the action of climate, but it is asserted that 'once, in the flight of ages,' some genuine little negro, or rather many such, were born of Caucasian, Mongol, or other light-skinned parents, and then have turned about and changed the type of the inhabitants of a whole continent. So, in America, the countless aborigines found on this continent, which we have reason to believe were building mounds before the time of Abraham, are the offspring of a race changed by accidental or congenital varieties. Thus, too, old China, India, Australia, Oceana, etc., all owe their types, physical and mental, to congenital and accidental varieties, and are descended from Adam and Eve! Can human credulity go further, or human ingenuity invent any argument more absurd?"