600 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
dered these garden spots of the earth Meccas of pilgrimage? Viewed 
in a still larger way, is it not, indeed, the very beneficence of nature 
in these regards which has induced or permitted a higher evolution 
of the human species in Europe than in any of the other continents. 
The races certainly began even. Why are the results for Europe as 
a whole so superior to-day? Alfred Russel Wallace, I am sure, 
would have been ready with a cogent reason. What right have we 
to dissociate these concomitantly operative influences of race and 
environment and ascribe the superiority of physical type to the effect 
of intermixture alone? Yet, on the other hand, does not the whole 
evolutionary hypothesis compel us to accept some such favorable 
conclusion? What leads to the survival of the fittest, unless there be 
the opportunity for variation of type, from which effective choice 
may result? And yet most students of biology agree, I take it, in 
the belief that the crossing of types must not be too violently extreme. 
Nature proceeds in her work by short and easy stages. At this point 
the opportunity for the students of heredity, like Galton, Pearson, and 
-their fellow-workers appears. What, for instance, is the order of 
transmission of physical traits as between the two parents in any 
union? We have seen how unevenly assorted much of the inter- 
mixture in the United States tends to be. If, as between the Irish 
and the Italians, who are palpably evincing a tendency to mate to- 
gether, it is commonly the Italian male who seeks the Irish wife; 
and if, as Pearson avers, inheritance in a line through the same sex 
is prepotent over inheritance from the other sex, what interesting 
possibilities of hereditary physical differences may result ? 
An interesting query suggested by the results of scientific breeding 
and the study of inheritance among lower forms of animal life is 
this, what chance is there that out of this forcible dislocation and 
abnormal intermixture of all the peoples of the civilized word there 
may emerge a physical type tending to revert to an ancestral one, 
older than any of the present European varieties? The law seems to 
be well supported elsewhere that crossing between highly evolved 
varieties or types tends to cause reversion to the original stock, and 
the greater the divergence between the crossed varieties the more 
powerful does the reversionary tendency become. Most of us are 
familar with the illustrations, such as the reversion among sheep 
to the primary dark type, and the emergence of the old wild blue- 
rock pigeon from blending of the fantail and pouter varieties. ‘The 
same law is borne out in the vegetable world, the facts being well 
known to fruit growers and horticulturists. The more recently- 
acquired characteristics, especially those which are less funda- 
mentally useful, are sloughed off, and the ancestral features, common 
to all varieties, emerge from dormancy into prominence. Issue need 
not be raised, as set forth by Dr. G. A. Reid, whether the result of 
