Sick Writer Burn

The question of the destruction of one race by another—that is, by violence—is distinct from that of natural causes, leading to the supplanting one race by another; and, of consequence, the successful transplanting of a race of men from one continent to another, from one zone of the earth to its opposite, or even to one seemingly analogous, is one merely of fact, and has nothing whatever to do with moral, metaphysical, or theological theories; it is an inquiry into the physical or physiological laws regulating man's existence on the globe. 

"All nature is fixed but man, who is for ever changing." 

In this effective passage there are more errors than words. 

For if by nature the writer meant the living world, then we have the evidence of Cuvier and all anatomists that it has not changed since that period to which the writer assigns "the creation of all things;" and secondly, man never changes any more than other living beings, belonging, as he evidently does, to the same category with them. 

The existing order of things did not always exist; this is now a fact which the "effective writers" just quoted resisted to the very last. Nature changes, no doubt: the era of the Saurians is gone and past; and the semi-barbarous modern Celt and money-loving Saxon deems the descendants of ancient Rome unworthy the treatment of men! Still, I hold that neither Celt nor Roman is essentially changed from what he was, as time will show.

—Robert Knox, The Races of Men