194 SIR WILLIAM FLOWER chap. 



tions and partly by the Municipality of Paris and of 

 the Departments of the Seine. The ''school" had 

 laboratories and a staff of professors, who lectured 

 on the very various branches of study into which 

 the science is divided, treating it not only from the 

 biological and anatomical point of view, but also 

 dealing with ethnology, manners, customs, pre- 

 historic man, and sociology. To these laboratories 

 all the persons of outlandish nationalities dying in 

 the Paris hospitals are brought and dissected, that 

 any physical peculiarities may be duly noted and 

 recorded. 



In order that travellers may make the best of 

 such opportunities for obtaining human specimens 

 as chance may throw in their way, they can go to 

 the " school " and receive instructions how to 

 preserve such examples so as to be scientifically 

 useful. 



The possibilities of a natural classification of the 

 races of man seemed to Flower remote. 



The difficulties in the way of applying zoological principles 

 to the classification of men are vastly greater than in the case of 

 most animals, the problem being one of much greater com- 

 plexity. When groups of animals become so far differentiated 

 from each other as to represent separate species, they remain 

 isolated; they may break up into further subdivisions — in fact 

 it is only by further subdivisions that a new species is formed. 

 But it is of the very essence of species that they cannot 

 recombine, and so give rise to new forms. With the varieties of 

 man it is otherwise. They have never so far separated as to 

 answer to the definition of species. All races are fertile one with 

 another, though perhaps in different degrees. Hence new 



