822 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The problem of this difference of idiosyncrasy, indeed, is one so 

 intimately bound up with all our ideas of our own origin and nature 

 that it well deserves a few minutes' consideration at the hands of the 

 impartial psychological philosopher. It has for each of us a personal 

 interest and importance as well ; for each of us wishes naturally to 

 know how and why he happened to come by his own charming and 

 admirable character. Yet, unhappily, while there is no subject on 

 earth so interesting as ourselves (the one theme on which " all men 

 are fluent and none agreeable "), there is none upon which the views 

 and opinions of other people appear to us all so lamentably shallow 

 and lacking in msight. They talk about us, forsooth, exactly as if — 

 well, exactly as if we were other people. They bluntly ignore those 

 delicate and subtile distinctions of idiosyncrasy which raise each of us, 

 viewed with his own introspective eyeglass, into a class by himself, 

 infinitely superior to the rest of creation. 



Let us see how far we can gain any light from the doctrine of he- 

 redity on this curious question of the origin of character. 



If a white man marries a negro, their children, boys and girls alike, 

 are all mulattoes. Let us make to ourselves no illusions or mistakes 

 upon this score : each one is simply and solely a pure mulatto, exactly 

 half-way in color, feature, hair, and stature, between his father's race 

 and his mother's. People who have not lived in a mixed community 

 of blacks and whites often ignore or misunderstand this fundamental 

 fact of hereditary philosophy ; they imagine that one of the children 

 of such a marriage may be light brown, and another dark brown ; one 

 almost white, and one almost black ; that the resulting strains may to 

 a great extent be mingled indefinitely and in varying proportions. Not 

 a bit of it. A mulatto is a mulatto, and a quadroon is a quadroon, 

 with just one half and one fourth of negro blood respectively ; and 

 anybody who has once lived in an ex-slave-owning country can pick 

 out the proportion of black or white elements in any particular brown 

 person he meets with as much accuracy as the stud-book shows in 

 recording the pedigree of famous race-horses. Black and white pro- 

 duce mulattoes — all mulattoes alike, to a shade of identity ; mulatto 

 and white produce quadroon — all quadroon, and no mistake about it ; 

 mulatto and black produce sambo ; quadroon and Avhite give us octo- 

 roon ; and so forth ad infinitum. After the third cross persistently 

 in either direction, the strain of which less than one eighth persists 

 becomes at last practically indistinguishable, and the child is "white 

 by law," or " black by law," as the case may be, without the faintest 

 mark of its slight opposite intermixture. I speak here of facts 

 which I have carefully examined at first hand ; all the nonsensical 

 talk about finger-nails and knuckles, and persistence of the negro 

 type forever, is pure unmitigated slave-owning prejudice. The child 

 of an octoroon by a white man is simply white ; and no acuteness 

 on earth, no scrutiny conceivable, would ever discover the one-six- 



