american-holocaust

226 AMERICAN HOLOCAUST"lyke bestes without any resonablenes .... And they ete also on[e] another. The man etethe his wyf his chyldern ... they hange also the bodyesor persons fleeshe in the smoke as men do with us swynes fleshe." 83As for how such savages should be treated, notes Pennington, "far frombeing repelled by Spanish repression of the natives," the earliest Englishpropagandists writing about the New World "looked upon [such repression]as the model to be followed by their own countrymen." 84To citizens of Britain and the lands of northern Europe, as with theSpanish and Portuguese to the south, wild men and other creatures of halfhumanpedigree were as real in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asthey had been in the Middle Ages. As always, such odd and dangerousspecies were given their place on the outer fringes of humanity within theGreat Chain of Being. John Locke believed in the existence of hybrid speciesthat encompassed characteristics of the human and animal-and eventhe plant and animal-kingdoms, and so did most other intellectuals, suchas the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosopher GottfriedLeibniz. As Leibniz wrote, in the midst of a long peroration on the subject:All the orders of natural beings form but a single chain, in which the variousclasses, like so many rings, are so closely linked one to another that it isimpossible for the senses or the imagination to determine precisely the pointat which one ends and the next begins-all the species which, so to say, lienear to or upon the borderlands being equivocal, and endowed with characterswhich might equally well be assigned to either of the neighboringspecies. Thus there is nothing monstrous in the existence of zoophytes, orplant-animals, as Budaeus calls them; on the contrary, it is wholly in keepingwith the order of nature that they should exist. 85Added Locke:In all the visible corporeal world we see no chasms or gaps. All quite downfrom us the descent is by easy steps, and a continued series that in eachremove differ very little one from the other. There are fishes that have wingsand are not strangers to the airy region; and there are some birds that areinhabitants of the water, whose blood is as cold as fishes. . . . There areanimals so near of kin both to birds and beasts that they are in the middlebetween both. Amphibious animals link the tem~strial and aquatic together;. . . not to mention what is confidently reported of mermaids or sea-men.There are some brutes that seem to have as much reason and knowledge assome that are called men; and the animal and vegetable kingdoms are sonearly joined, that if you will take the lowest of one and the highest of theother, there will scarce be perceived any great difference between them. 86Until well into the eighteenth century others of the finest minds in Europebelieved in, along with the principle of overlapping species continuity