"PROFESSOR RIDGEWAY AND RACIAL ORIGINS" 131 



importance to the influence of environment, I hold also very 

 strongly the doctrine of heredity— in fact, too strongly for 

 Mr. Houghton's fancy when he has to deal with my doctrines 

 of the value of Heredity as a most important, if not the most 

 important factor, in our own chief social problems. But the 

 grand problem of the true relation between Heredity and En- 

 vironment has yet to be solved. 



Mr. Houghton's case depends wholly on the assumption that 

 man is absolutely free from the natural laws which condition 

 the osteology and pigmentation of other animals. This he 

 thinks was settled once for all by Sir E. Ray Lankester. " As 

 Sir Ray Lankester," he writes (p. 273) "demonstrated so 

 brilliantly three years ago, man is an insurgent against nature. 

 Once proto-man utilised skins as a protection against the 

 inclemency of the weather, once he kindled fire to serve as 

 a shield against cold and wild beasts, and fabricated for himself 

 cunning weapons of offence, he withdrew himself definitely and 

 for ever from the operation of the old zoological environment." 

 These are bold words, but they are certainly an accurate state- 

 ment of the views put forward by Sir E. Ray Lankester in his 

 Romanes Lecture at Oxford (1905), since republished in his book 

 entitled The Kingdom of Man. On p. 25 of the latter work he 

 writes : " The mental qualities which have developed in Man, 

 though traceable in a vague and rudimentary condition in some 

 of his animal associates, are of such an unprecedented power, 

 and so far dominate everything else in his activities as a living 

 organism, that they have to a very large extent, if not entirely, 

 cut him off from the general operation of that process of Natural 

 Selection and survival of the fittest, which up to their appearance 

 had been the law of the living world. ... If for the purpose of 

 analysis, as it were, we extract Man from the rest of Nature, 

 of which he is truly a product and part, then we may say 

 that Man is Nature's rebel. Where Nature says die, Man 

 says I will live. According to the law previously in universal 

 operation, Man should have been limited in geographical area, 

 killed by extremes of cold or of heat, subject to starvation 

 if one kind of diet were unattainable, should have been unable 

 to increase and multiply, just as are his animal relatives, without 

 losing his specific structure and acquiring new physical charac- 

 teristics according to the requirements of the new con- 

 ditions into which he strayed, and should have perished except 



