THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE 19 



THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE 



Br Professor T. D. A. COCKERELL 



UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO 



EVOLUTION is not an orderly march along a well-defined high- 

 way, to the slow time of the music of the spheres. In its 

 details, it is an irregular process, sometimes so slow that millions of 

 years seem to make no difference; sometimes so rapid that a single 

 generation marks a notable advance. Many of its most remarkable 

 products come into existence only to perish shortly afterwards, because 

 they are exclusively adapted to conditions which are not permanent. 

 Rapid progress seems usually to go with a high percentage of failures, 

 as though progress itself were only an attempt to dodge the stroke of 

 doom. Out of all this man, the species Homo sapiens, zoologically 

 speaking one of the higher apes, has in these latter days evolved. A 

 creature in many ways inferior to his brother mammalia, but favored 

 by the gods. Denuded of hair, he is obliged to spend much of his time 

 and energy providing artificial clothing; slow of foot, he is compelled 

 to devise means of travel not depending upon his muscular activities; 

 so deficient in the sense of smell, that he does not know, as do the dog 

 and the ant, that it is the most important of all the senses; lacking a 

 tail, and with no grasping power in his feet, he rarely ventures to 

 climb the trees; a poor creature indeed, well-fitted to be the laughing 

 stock of the rest of animal creation. 



All this would not be so bad if, like his sylvan ancestors, he could 

 go on his way with a placid sense of his own sufficiency. Alas ! even 

 this poor privilege is denied to him; in the Garden of Eden, at the 

 very beginning of his career, he acquired the sense of sin, and was 

 henceforth to be a wanderer in a spiritual as well as a physical sense. 

 Hence it comes that we, in this year 1910, think it proper to enquire 

 anxiously about the future of our species, an inquiry which would cer- 

 tainly never occur to any other species of mammal. 



At the very outset we are bound to observe that without exception 

 the species of mammalia are short-lived. The records of the Tertiary 

 rocks show a continually changing panorama of mammalian life, in 

 which genera and species come and go, while plants, mollusca and other 

 lowly organisms remain almost unaltered. "VVe further notice that the 

 comparatively brief existence of these animals may be terminated in 

 either of two ways — by extinction, or by change into something else. 

 When the creatures are very highly developed in special ways, they 



