"PROFESSOR RIDGEWAY AND RACIAL ORIGINS" 145 



Natural Selection does not work in modern communities, he 

 is driven to abandon the doctrine of Heredity and nothing 

 but Heredity, trumpeted so loudly in all the fore part of his 

 strictures, and he writes as though it were I who had denied 

 the influence of environment and as if he were correcting me 

 for my heinous blunder. 



His statement (derived from Sir E. Ray Lankester) of the 

 working of Natural Selection amongst the lower animals is 

 equally faulty. It is not alone adaptation to its environment 

 which preserves the one deer or monkey, when another's life is 

 cut short. Chance may determine that one should be killed by 

 a leopard, and that its companion should escape, not because 

 the latter was the stronger or swifter or better protected by 

 its colour, but simply because it was farther away from the 

 leopard when he made his spring. 



It would have been strange if Mr. Houghton had not ended 

 up with the usual ravings about " Society," the chief stock- 

 in-trade of all his tribe. " At present Society, after pushing 

 the mass of the proletariat into the mire of base surroundings 

 is apt, standing daintily aloof, to point the finger of scorn at 

 them, as incurable heirs to a vicious Heredity." These be fine 

 words, but Mr. Houghton as usual omits to explain the use 

 of the term on which all turns, and leaves his reader in the 

 dark respecting the nature of that "society" which pushes 

 the proletariat into the mire. Yet he himself has just admitted 

 that " even in civilised States there is an evolution which sends 

 the drunkard, the wastrel, and the sluggard to join the dregs 

 of the population, and confers somewhat tardy laurels on 

 thrift, on forethought and on intelligence." Cannot he see that 

 he himself in his last sentence is describing the formation of 

 that " society " which he denounces so furiously ? He has 

 simply put into other words the doctrine respecting the rise 

 of the middle and upper classes by Natural Selection stated 

 fully in my address. But his knowledge of human society 

 is on a par with his knowledge of Natural History. " Only 

 when men and women start on life's race as nearly equal as 

 human institutions will permit, shall we be able to point with 

 any confidence to the lower class, and say these possess an 

 undesirable heredity." But yet any labourer's family will 

 aff'ord us a test of the falsity of this rhetoric. I write with 

 one before me. Three brothers, born of the same father 



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