138 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



to have little relation to the incidence of disease. Size and shape of 

 head in man have been taken as a rough measure of size and shape of 

 brain. They cannot tell you more — perhaps not as much as brain- 

 weight — and if brain-weight were closely associated with intelligence, 

 then man should be at his intellectual prime in his teens. 



Again, too often is this idea of close association of mentality and 

 physique carried into the analysis of individuals within a human group, 

 i.e. of men belonging to one or another of the many races which have 

 gone to build up our population. We talk as if it was our population 

 which was mixed, and not our germplasm. We are accustomed to speak 

 of a typical Englishman. For example, Charles Darwin; we think of 

 his mind as a typical English mind, working in a typical Enghsh 

 manner, yet when we come to study his pedigree we seek in vain 

 for ' pmity of race. ' He is descended in four different lines from 

 Irish kinglets; he is descended in as many lines from Scottish and 

 Pictish kings. He had Manx blood. He claims descent in at least 

 three lines from Alfred the Great, and so links up with Anglo-Saxon 

 blood, but he links up also in several lines with Charlemagne and the 

 Carlovingians. He sprang also from the Saxon Emperors of Germany, 

 as well as from Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufens. He had Nor- 

 wegian blood and much Norman blood. He had descent from the 

 Dukes of Bavaria, of Saxony, of Flanders, the Princes of Savoy, and 

 the Kings of Italy. He had the blood in his veins of Franks, Alamans, 

 Merovingians, Burgundians, and Longobards. He sprang in direct 

 descent from the Hun rulers of Hungary and the Greek Ejnperors of 

 Constantinople. If I recollect rightly, Ivan the Terrible provides a 

 Eussian link. There is probably not one of the races of Europe con- 

 cerned in the folk-wanderings which has not a share in the ancestry 

 of Charles Darwin. If it has been possible in the case of one English- 

 man of this kind to show in a considerable number of lines how impure 

 is his race, can we venture to assert that if the like knowledge were 

 possible of attainment, we could expect greater purity of blood in any 

 of his countrymen? What we are able to show may occur by tracing 

 an individual in historic times, have we any valid reason for supposing 

 did not occur in prehistoric times, wherever physical barriers did not 

 isolate a limited section of mankind ? If there ever was an association 

 of definite mentality with physical characters, it would break down 

 as soon as race mingled freely with race, as it has done in historic 

 Europe. Isolation or a strong feeling against free inter- breeding — as 

 in a colour differentiation — could alone maintain a close association 

 between physical and mental characters. Europe has never recovered 

 from the general hybridisation of the folk-wanderings, and it is only 

 the cessation of wars of conquest and occupation, the spread of the 

 conception of nationality and the reviving consciousness of race, which 

 is providing the barriers which may eventually lead through isolation 

 to a new linking-up of physical and mental characters. 



In a population which consists of non-intermarrying castes, as in 

 India, physique and external appearance may be a measure of the type 

 of mentality. In the highly and recently hybridised nations of Europe 

 there are really but few fragments of ' pure races ' left, and it is 



