56 ANTHROPOLOGY IN WESTERN HEMISPHERE AND PACIFIC ISLANDS. 



lip, the Jewish nose, the Teuton's blue eyes, the African's hair and skin color 

 persist in America. Ethnic characteristics, such as the social instinct of the 

 French, the "love of life" of the German, the conservatism of the Englishman, 

 survive in the American environment. But migration to new environments, 

 and amalgamation or intermarriage between two or more different ethnic 

 groups tend to cause or permit variation from the otherwise normal heredi- 

 tary types. Studies of the influence of environment and amalgamation on 

 the hereditary characteristics of ethnic groups are therefore necessary. 



INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT ON MANKIND. 



Man's physical, mental, and moral fitness to meet his environment is the 

 sine qua non of his survival. 



Human skin color probably offers the most patent illustration of the 

 selective influence of environment on mankind. The dark races have their 

 natural geographic areas of distribution in hot, sun-flooded lands, where the 

 heavily pigmented skin protects the delicate human organism from the 

 destructive rays of the tropical sun. Norway, with so much of its light from 

 the "midnight sun," has favored the selection of blondness or relative absence 

 of skin pigment. 



Extremely high and extremely low temperatures weaken the mental 

 powers. The dominant and progressive races have flourished in the earth's 

 temperate climates, not in areas of extreme heat or cold. 



Early man, like the instinctive animal, was largely a product of environ- 

 ment. Gradually, however, developing man modified his environment. One 

 may almost say that the majority of man's efforts have been to make his 

 environments what he wishes them to be. 



Man has already crossed many of his natural environmental barriers. 

 One of three conditions must inevitably follow such a challenge to nature. 

 Either he must adapt himself to the new environment by becoming modified, 

 or he must modify the new environment to become similar to the old, or he 

 must perish. In apparently flattering measure migrating man to-day modi- 

 fies his environment through ceaseless effort. There are insuperable obstacles 

 to wholesale modification. The Anglo-Saxon can not make a Temperate 

 Zone of the Tropical. The Scandinavian emigrant to America can not draw 

 a veil across the brilliant sunlight of Minnesota and the Dakotas. The Brit- 

 ish race in India has modified the environment only in spots. There is no 

 knowledge that the race is being successfully modified to meet the tropical 

 conditions of India. The breakdown of noticeable numbers of Scandinavians 

 transplanted to our central Northwest is an historical fact. Is the cause 

 environmental? Is the number of those who break simply the toll of adapta- 

 tion to the new environment, or is it the first sign of a wholesale weakening? 



Eventually the incessant and insinuating influence of environment con- 

 quers man. Every distinctive environmental area, in its own time, shapes 

 and claims its own sons and daughters; others there, unfitted, perish; the 

 environment disowns them and casts them out. 



