166 WORLD-POWER AND EVOLUTION 



take away the contribution of this ten-millionth of the human 

 race, and where would civilization be today? 



Since the men who cause most of the world's progress — and 

 also its worst misery — are all extreme types, it becomes highly 

 important to discover the reasons for such variations. Doubtless 

 there are many reasons, but only two seem as yet to be well enough 

 understood to warrant attention in this book. The first is 

 mixture of races or types, a process whose effect few students 

 would question. The other is climatic extremes like those dis- 

 cussed in the last chapter. Their effect is so little understood 

 that we must consider some of the evidence in detail. 



To begin with the mixture of types, in an ordinary peasant 

 village of almost any long-settled country, especially in regions 

 that are backward, one family is almost like another. For cen- 

 turies few brides have been brought from other villages, and few 

 men have come from outside. All the families are therefore 

 related and have virtually the same inheritance. Hence new types 

 rarely arise through the union of parents with divergent quali- 

 ties. If by any chance such a type does arise, it is frowned upon 

 and discouraged. Only minds of more than usual originality can 

 appreciate the new ideas evolved by similar minds that depart 

 from the standard type. 



Among the upper classes and among people who travel, diverse 

 types intermarry much more than among conservative peasants. 

 In cities this tendency is accentuated by the fact that the unusual 

 minds of the villages are apt to drift cityward, where they mate 

 with others of their kind. Thus, for good or for ill, city children 

 vary more than country children. This is one reason why Cat- 

 tell's study of men of science shows an increasing tendency for 

 the proportion of eminent men born in cities and their suburbs 

 to increase faster than the general population of such places. 

 New countries are like cities. As the "moody" or "trifling" 

 country boy goes to the city and is recognized as a genius, so 

 the Pilgrims, Puritans, Huguenots, and others came to America 



