  Edited by: Lalor, John J. Display paragraphs in this book
containing: First Pub. Date New York: Maynard, Merrill, and Co.
Pub. Date 889 of 1105     RACES OF MANKIND. Formerly an article
on races would with difficulty have found place in a political
encyclopædia, for men had not then come to consider this
question as anything more than one of anthropology and natural
history, and did not imagine that the differences which they
noticed in the different tribes of the great human family could
possess as much interest for the historian and the moralist as
for the naturalist or the physiologist. It is only in our own
day that general ethnology has become an important branch of the
historical sciences, and that men have conceived the idea of
seeking, in the physical origin of peoples, for the secret of
their destinies and an explanation of the results which they
have accomplished, or in which they have participated. Until
very recently, historians acknowledged in the history of
humanity but one sole physical influ