198 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



have suddenly run up against one another along a racial frontier. 

 Such was the old-fashioned view of races in the days before the 

 theory of evolution had remodeled our ways of thinking, when 

 human races were held to be distinct creations of a Divine will. 

 We conceive of it all quite differently. These types for us are all 

 necessarily offshoots from the same trunk. The problem is far 

 m.ore complex to us for this reason. It is doubly dynamic. Up- 

 building and demolition are taking place at the same time. By 

 our constitution of racial types we seek to simplify the matter for 

 a moment to lose sight of all the destructive forces, and from ob- 

 scure tendencies to derive ideal results. "VVe picture an anthro- 

 pological goal which might have been attained had the life con- 

 ditions been less complicated. 



Are we in this more presumptuous than other natural scien- 

 tists ? Is the geologist more certain of his deductions in his res- 

 toration of an ideal mountain chain from the denuded roots which 

 alone bear witness to the fact to-day ? In this case all the super- 

 structure has long since disappeared. The restoration is no less 

 scientific. It represents more clearly than aught else the rise and 

 disappearance, the results and future tendencies of great geologi- 

 cal movements. We take no more liberties with our racial types 

 than this geologist with his mountains ; nor do we mean more by 

 our restorations. The parallel is instructive. The geologist is 

 well aware that the uplifted folds as he depicts them never existed 

 in completeness at any given time. He knows full well that ero- 

 sion took place even as lateral pressure raised the contorted strata ; 

 that one may even have been the cause of the other. If indeed 

 denudation could have been postponed until all the elevation of 

 the strata had been accomplished, then the restoration of the 

 mountain chain would stand for a real but vanished thing. This, 

 the geologist is well aware, was not thus and so. In precisely the 

 same sense do we conceive of our races. Far be it from us to 

 assume that these three races of ours ever in the history of man- 

 kind existed in absolute purity or isolation from one another. As 

 soon might the branch grow separate and apart from the parent 

 oak. No sooner have environmental influences, peculiar habits of 

 life, and artificial selection commenced to generate distinct vari- 

 eties of men from the common clay ; no sooner has heredity set 

 itself to perpetuating these ; than chance variation, migration, in- 

 termixture, and changing environments, with a host of minor dis- 

 persive factors, begin to efface this constructive work. Racial up- 

 building and demolition, as we have said, have ever proceeded 

 side by side. Never is the perfect type in view, while yet it is 

 always possible. " Race," says Topinard, " in the present state of 

 things is an abstract conception, a notion of continuity in discon- 

 tinuity, of unity in diversity. It is the rehabilitation of a real 



