STABILITY OF RACIAL CHARACTERS 121 



but not more so than occurs in the best European skulls, 

 and the average capacity of the skull exceeded most modern 

 races. There was no prognathous jaw or prominent ridge 

 over the eyes, and it is practically certain that the features 

 were of no lower type than the most civilised European 

 races. These facts are entirely in accord with the theory 

 of recapitulation. The racial characters appear to be very 

 little susceptible to change, and it seems that but little of 

 the inheritance of the offspring can be derived from the 

 individual variations of the immediate ancestors. Any theory 

 which involves the assumption of morphological units as 

 representing characters must bring us to an impasse in a 

 very few generations, as is demonstrated by the working 

 out of such a theory to comparatively few degrees upward 

 from offspring to parents, grandparents, and so on. 



It is quite obvious that the resemblances between indi- 

 viduals of the same race are enormously greater than the 

 differences. Every individual, however, differs from its 

 fellows in small points. The bulk of the characters are 

 similar, but nevertheless there are small differences. These 

 small differences may be due to variations in the particular 

 individual, or to small variations inherited from the imme- 

 diate ancestors. It would seem then that from the parents, 

 grandparents, and more immediate ancestors there is a great 

 probability that the offspring will inherit some of these com- 

 paratively small individual variations, but that as the bulk 

 of the characters are similar in all the individuals of the 

 race they must have been inherited from a much more remote 

 ancestry. It is true that the bulk of the characters must 

 necessarily have been inherited through the parents and 

 immediate ancestors, but regression has been constantly at 

 work upon the variations of the individual, and only a few of 

 them have been preserved. The individual variations even 

 of the parents frequently do not appear in the offspring, and 

 this happens at every generation. It is only the common 

 racial characters that go through many generations, either 



