THE UNIQUE MAMMAL 37 



portunities for people to mate together who under earlier condi- 

 tions never had any such chance. Such opportunities are always 

 taken advantage of. No degree of strangeness of people to each 

 other, dissimilarity or supposed ugliness of form or features, or 

 habit or custom represses completely, or even significantly, the 

 gratification of the sex appetite. Contact of races or peoples 

 whenever and wherever it happens means sexual congress across 

 whatever varietal differences there may be between them. With 

 charming naivete an unsophisticated young lad who kept a diary 

 of his experiences when on the gold rush to the Klondike in 

 1898 (W. R. Curtin, Yukon Voyage, 1938, p. 154) made a 

 profound biological observation when he wrote: "I see and 

 hear of so many men who will marry any kind of woman when 

 women are scarce j not bums either. So-called refined, educated 

 gentlemen, even college professors, the best we have will do 

 the same. If a man can live with a smelly Indian squaw, any 

 kind of white woman is too good for him." Presumably only 

 inexperience led this young man to fail to recognize that some- 

 thing other than mere statistics of "scarcity" was involved in the 

 picture that so shocked him. 



If all races and varieties of mankind are fertile among them-, 

 selves, as is the fact, it follows that increased facility of transport 

 and travel will result, and is resulting, in the steady breeding 

 out of the differences that have hitherto marked the varieties of 

 men. This process is going on at the present time at an ever 

 accelerating rate. The "swamping effects of inter-crossing," in 

 the phrase of the old Darwinists, is being exemplified by man 

 on a world-wide scale. Men get about easily and freely nowa- 

 days. Because they do, humanity is being slowly but surely bred 

 to a dead level of mediocrity, using, this term in a strictly techni- 

 cal statistical sense rather than one of disparagement. In genetic 

 terminology there is being brought about, at an ever accelerating 

 pace, a more and more uniform, horizontal, or random distri- 

 bution among mankind of the genes that hitherto have main- 

 tained racial or varietal differentiations, because of their original 

 segregation in separate groups of people. 



For lack of the right kind of data it is impossible to measure 



