ZOOLOGICAL LAWS 517 



change his skin as to change radically his social and religions ideas. 

 It has been shown by experience that Christianity can make but little 

 headway amongst many peoples in Africa or Asia, where, on the other 

 hand, Muhammadanism has made and is steadily making progress, 

 acting distinctly for good, as in Africa, by putting down human sacri- 

 fice and replacing fetish worship by a lofty monotheism. This is prob- 

 ably due to the fact that Muhammadanism is a religion evolved amongst 

 a Semitic people who live in latitudes bordering on the aboriginal races 

 of Africa and Asia, and that it is far more akin in its social ideas 

 to those of the Negro or Malay than are those of Christianity, more 

 especially of that form of Christianity evolved during the last twelve 

 centuries by the Teutonic peoples of upper Europe, who are of all races 

 farthest in physical characteristics 1 , in religious ideals and social insti- 

 tutions, from the dark races of Africa and Asia. This great gulf is 

 due not merely to shallow prejudice against other people's notions ; it is 

 as deep-seated as is the physical antipathy felt by the Teuton for the 

 Negro, which is itself due to the very different climatic conditions under 

 which both races have been evolved. The Teuton does not freely blend 

 with the black, and even when he does intermarry he treats his own 

 half-bred progeny with contempt, or at most with toleration. On the 

 other hand, some south Europeans — for example, the Portuguese — are 

 said to have little objection to intermarrying with dark races and allow- 

 ing the mixed progeny an equal social status, whilst the Arab through 

 the ages has freely taken to wife the African, and has never hesitated 

 to treat the hybrid offspring as equals. There is thus a wide breach 

 between the physique and the social and religious ideas of the African 

 and our own; but, as political and legal institutions are indissolubly 

 bound up with social and religious, it follows inevitably that the 

 political and legal institutions of a race cradled in northern Europe 

 are exceedingly ill adapted for the children of the equator. Accord- 

 ingly, in any wise administration of these regions it must be a primary 

 object to study the native institutions, to modify and elevate them 

 whenever it may be possible, but never to seek to eradicate and supplant 

 them. Any attempt to do so will be but vain, for these institutions 

 are as much part of the land as are its climate, its soil, its fauna 

 and its flora. " Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret." Let 

 us hope for a successful issue for the effort now being made by the 

 Royal Anthropological Institute to establish an Imperial Bureau of 

 Anthropology whose function will be not only to carry out system- 

 atically the scientific study of man, but also to aid the administrator 

 and the legislator, the merchant and the missionary. 



III. I now pass to my last and most important topic — natural laws 

 in relation to our own social legislation. We have seen that environ- 

 ment is a powerful factor in the differentiation of the various races of 



