40 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



them find place. What in the latter is called a species must in the former often 

 be designated as a race. 



Kant's elaboration of an ethnological scheme upon the basis of these 

 definitions does not here concern us. But it is worth noting that he 

 finds that the only character which is " invariably inherited " from both 

 parents — and therefore the only mark of a true or " natural " race — is 

 skin-color; and that, using this criterion, he finds that there are just 

 four races of men, the white, the negro, the Mongolian or " hunnish " 

 and the Hindu. From these four originals Kant was prepared to 

 explain all the hereditary shadings of the various peoples of the earth 

 as the results of diverse hybridizations. The question of greatest in- 

 terest of all, from the standpoint of biological theory, still remained to 

 be asked. Within the limits of a "natural species," we have seen, 

 Kant recognized that profound modifications of physical characters took 

 place, and became permanent and transmissible through heredity. 

 Thus, he thinks it at least a probable conjecture that the original type 

 of man was white. But from white ancestors black and yellow and 

 brown races have been developed. How did this come about? What, 

 in Kant's words, are " the immediate causes of the origination of these 

 different races"? He has his own entirely confident answer to the 

 question. A natural answer for an eighteenth-century biologist would 

 have been to say that these differentiated racial characters are the results 

 of environmental modifications of individuals, which gradually have 

 become hereditary. But such an explanation Kant emphatically rejects. 

 It would hardly do to call him an eighteenth-century Weismannist; 

 but he was (though not without serious but unrecognized inconsisten- 

 cies) a vigorous opponent of the supposition that acquired characters 

 can be inherited, and an unqualified partisan of the doctrine of the 

 continuity and unmodifiability of the germ-plasm. His reasons for 

 taking this position betray once more his entire inability to conceive of 

 the transformation of " real " species into other species. 



There are current, he admits,^* many, though poorly authenticated, 

 stories of cases in which acquired characters have been inherited : tales 

 of the "influence of the imagination of pregnant women" upon the 

 foetus; of "the plucking out of the beard of entire peoples, and of 

 the docking of the tails of English horses, by which nature was com- 

 pelled to eliminate from the processes of reproduction in these organ- 

 isms a product for which those processes were originally organized " ; 

 accounts of " the artificial flattening of the noses of new-born infants, 

 which peculiarity nature is supposed finally to have taken up into the 

 reproductive faculty." Kant rightly regards all such stories with a 

 sceptical eye; but his theoretical reasons for doing so are significant. 

 These accounts are to be rejected because they conflict with a general 



" " Conception of Race," S 5, and Antnerkung. 



