62 THE FOUR SEGREGATIVE PRINCIPLES. 



handicapped in the struggle for life, through lack of innate adaptation. 

 Man was probably fully adapted in constitutional character to warm 

 climates before the arts of clothing and house-building had arisen; 

 but we may well believe that these arts were found of the utmost 

 importance when tribes began to invade the colder climates, or when 

 cold weather invaded their native lands; and that it was in conse- 

 quence of these arts that permanent colonies in the colder regions 

 became possible. How then shall we account for the constitutional 

 adaptations of the Eskimo race adaptations extending even to the 

 tissues of the body, so that they are incased with a layer of fat just 

 beneath the skin, rendering the same kind of protection from the cold 

 that the whale receives from his blubber?* It seems probable that 

 we have in this case an illustration of the way in which accommoda- 

 tion prepares for, and leads up to, certain conditions producing selec- 

 tion. In the remote ancestors of the Eskimo, the habit of protecting 

 from the cold by clothing and other arts undoubtedly preceded the 

 establishing of the racial characters by which they are now in a meas- 

 ure protected ; but the devices of the accommodating faculties were 

 not sufficient to prevent those endowed with even slightly developed 

 constitutional powers for withstanding the cold from enjoying some 

 advantage in meeting the conditions of life, and so being gradually 

 selected. If this is a true interpretation of the case, it illustrates 

 what Professor Baldwin calls "organic selection" and Professor Lloyd 

 Morgan calls "accumulation of coincident variations." The import- 

 ance of this principle in preserving certain creatures, when subjected 

 to heavy change within the period of any one generation, can not be 

 questioned. The necessity for powers of accommodation in order to 

 meet successfully great changes is of two kinds: First, for power to 

 provide against great alternations in conditions that come to each gen- 

 eration, such as changes in temperature and changes in the degree of 

 moisture ; and second, for power to meet new sets of conditions, to 

 which the race has, in its previous experience, never been continuously 

 exposed. For the former of these classes of changes, many species of 

 the lowest animals and large numbers of plants are as fully equipped 

 as the higher animals, including man ; but the nature of the equipment 

 is, in the case of the plants, wholly physiological, and, in the case of 



* In "Greenland Icefields and Life in the North Atlantic," by G. Frederick 

 Wright and Warren Upham, I find the following quotation from F. A. Cook, eth- 

 nologist of the first Peary North Greenland Expedition, concerning this character 

 in the Eskimo: "The muscular outlines of the body are nearly obliterated from 

 the fact that they have immediately beneath the skin a layer of blubber, or areolar 

 tissue, which protects them against extreme cold." 



