EUROPEANS IN UNITED STATES—RIPLEY. 601 
crossbreeding is always in favor of reversion and never of progres- 
sion; but interesting possibilities linked up with this law may be 
suggested. All students of natural science have accepted the primary 
and proven tenets of the evolutionary hypothesis, or rather, let us 
say, of the law of evolution. And all alike acknowledge the subjec- 
tion of the human species to the operation of the same great laws ap- 
plicable to all other forms of life. It would have been profoundly 
suggestive to have heard from Huxley on a theme like this. We are 
familiar in certain isolated spots in Europe, the Dordogne in France 
for example, with the persistence of certain physical types without 
change from prehistoric times. The modern peasant is the proven 
descendant of the man of the stone age and the mammoth. But 
here is another mode of access to that primitive type, or even an 
older, running back to a time before the separation of European 
varieties of men began. Thus, to be more specific, there can be little 
doubt that the primitive type of European was brunette, probably 
with black eyes and hair and a swarthy skin. Teutonic blondness 
is certainly an acquired trait, not very recent, judged by historic 
standards, to be sure, but as certainly not old, measured by evolu- 
tionary time. What chance is there that in the unions of rufous 
Trish and dark Italian types a reversion in favor of brunetteness may 
result? Were it not for the inflammatory character of the contro- 
versy in a gathering of anthropologists over the relative primitive- 
ness of the dolichocephalic and brachycephalic types in Europe, I 
might be tempted to go further and speculate as to the bearing of 
American racial intermixture upon this much-mooted question. 
A relatively unimportant, yet theoretically very interesting, de- 
tail of the subject of racial intermixture is suggested in Wester- 
marck’s brilliant “ History of Human Marriage.” It is a well-known 
statistical law, almost the world over, that there are more boys than 
girls born into the world. The normal ratio of births is about 105 
males to 100 females. Students have long sought the reasons for this 
irregularity, but nothing has yet been proven conclusively. Wester- 
marck brings together much evidence to show that this proportion 
of sexes at birth is effected by the amount of inbreeding in any 
social group, crossing of different stocks tending to increase the per- 
centage of female birth. Thus, among the French half-breeds and 
mulattos in America, among mixed Jewish marriages, and in South 
and Central America female births may at times even offset the differ- 
ence and actually preponderate over the male birth. The interest 
of this topic lies in the fact that it is unique among social phenomena 
in being, so far as we know, independent of the human will. It 
is the expression of what may truly be denominated natural law. 
Westermarck’s general biological reasoning is that inasmuch as the 
rate of increase of any animal community is dependent upon the 
