THE TREND OF EVOLUTION 177 



ferior, and they are sometimes superior to either of the parent 

 races. Mendelian inheritance holds good in the crossing of 

 human races as well as everywhere else and it leads to all 

 kinds of combinations of the qualities of the parents. Accord- 

 ingly some hybrids may be expected to show the bad qualities 

 of both parent races while others show the good qualities of 

 both, but it is practically certain that the general or average 

 result of the crossing of a better and a poorer race is to strike 

 a balance somewhere between the two. 



If only good ore goes into the u melting pot" there is no 

 cause to fear for the result; and if those hybrids which com- 

 bine the good qualities of the parent races could be segregated 

 and bred, a race superior to any existing human type could 

 probably be established. This is just the method followed by 

 breeders in the production of improved races of plants and 

 animals, many of which are the products of deliberate hybridi- 

 zation. But the breeder ruthlessly eliminates inferior stock 

 and breeds only from the best, and if by some similar process 

 it were possible to eliminate from reproduction the inferior 

 racial combinations and to perpetuate the best, we might expect 

 to get from this great experiment in human hybridization a 

 very superior breed of men combining the good qualities of all 

 the constituent races. It seems very doubtful whether any such 

 result as this will ever be attained, and in the absence of such 

 selection and segregation the general result of race amalgama- 

 tion must be an averaging of the qualities of the parent races. 



The character of a composite race will depend not only upon 

 the qualities but also upon the relative numbers of the races 

 which enter into it, and the latter will depend upon the present 

 numbers of existing races, their rate of increase, cultural de- 

 velopment, and the habitable portions of the globe which they 

 control. In all of these respects the white races hold the lead, 

 followed in turn by the yellow, the brown, the black, and the 

 red races, and it is evident that unless the white races destroy 



