54 THE MENDEL JOURNAL 



supremely innocent of biological facts, rushed into 

 some complex biological problems and endeavoured 

 to civilise the Tasmanians. Acting under the im- 

 pelling influences of mistaken ideas, but prompted 

 by the noblest motives, they sought to change the 

 environment of these people, and to give them what 

 they imagined to be a better one. Their efforts were 

 rewarded by the extinction of the Tasmanians ! 

 In sometliing less than fifty years the whole race of 

 this people was eliminated, not by war, or plague, 

 or pestilence, but by the operation of those processes 

 that flow from the application of that crude, theoreti- 

 cal, and sentimental conception of the power . of 

 the environment to make good out of bad that 

 is the dominating influence of our own social efforts. 



Some day we shall learn that the characters of 

 men are relatively fixed and stable, and that they 

 are the products of evolution under set conditions. 

 As we find men, at any given period, in any given 

 place, they are adapted to the particular combination 

 of conditions under which they have evolved, and 

 to no other. Arbitrarily change these conditions, 

 as in the case of the Flax and the Tasmanians, and 

 the organisms, who are thereby no longer fitted to 

 the new conditions are destroyed. Leave them 

 alone as Nature made them — " let the Tasmanians 

 roam as they were wont, and undisturbed " — and 

 they will thrive. Interfere with them, by setting 

 up a dogma that rushes in where biological philosophy 

 fears to tread, and the objects of our solicitude 

 " become bewildered and dull, they lose all motives 



