274 Heredity and Environment 



pletely exterminated, as for instance the Lucayan Indians of the 

 West Indies, and the aborigines of Tasmania. 



Race Extermination. Few animals have suffered more whole- 

 sale destruction than have the more primitive race of men in dif- 

 ferent parts of the earth. Several species of man have become 

 entirely extinct, leaving only, as is generally believed, a single 

 existing species, Homo sapiens. Race extermination has been 

 witnessed in relatively recent times and on a large scale in the 

 West Indies, North and South America, Africa, Australia, New 

 Zealand and the Islands of the Pacific. But in the disappearance 

 of native races extermination is usually supplemented by amalga- 

 mation. After the most warlike members of a race have been 

 destroyed the more peaceful remnants are generally incorporated 

 in the conquering race. Thus the Maoris of New Zealand, the 

 finest native race with which the English have come in contact in 

 their colonies, were estimated to number more than a quarter of 

 a million at the end of the eighteenth century. Owing to im- 

 ported diseases and to destructive wars among the tribes and 

 with the English there are not fifty thousand of them today, and 

 these are gradually being absorbed into the white race. 



Undoubtedly there has been a great growth of altruism in the 

 modern world; there is a relatively new feeling among men that 

 nothing so becomes a strong nation as the exercise of justice 

 toward weaker ones, and many idealists maintain that every race 

 and every people has the right to live its life in its own way. But 

 however philanthropic they may be in theory, the practice of all 

 nations demonstrates that weaker and inferior peoples are not 

 permitted to stand in the way of dominant ones. When such 

 peoples occupy territory which is desired by more powerful 

 neighbors, they are either exterminated, expelled, exploited or 

 amalgamated with the conquering race. In practice their rights 

 are usually of small concern as compared with the desires of the 

 invaders, and the inaccessible or undesirable parts of the earth, 

 the deserts and mountains and regions of polar ice, become the 

 refuge of the less capable races, just as "the conies, who are but a 



