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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXI. No. 799 



protoplasm. Indeed it ought to be safe to 

 predict that the vernal increase in northern 

 waters will continue throughout the summer 

 wherever there is much cloudiness to temper 

 the lethal effects of the midday sun. Perhaps 

 this fully accounts for the wonderful fisheries 

 in northern cloudy, misty, foggy latitudes, 

 rich phyto-plankton serving as food to minute 

 animals, these as food for larger, and so on up 

 to those edible varieties upon which so many 

 millions of people subsist. 



It is to be hoped that there will be renewed 

 activity in studying the effects of light on 

 plant protoplasm regardless of its effect on the 

 leaf activities. There is opportunity for val- 

 uable deductions applicable to man, for we are 

 finding that the effects of excessive light on 

 unprotected migrant types are much more 

 profound than we formerly believed possible, 

 and there is room for improvement in daily 

 hygiene in the interests of the preservation 

 and eugenic development of these tjrpes. The 

 fact that plants depend upon light to enable 

 them to get their carbon food has concealed 

 the fact that it is a lethal agent to naked 

 protoplasm. The medical profession is slowly 

 realizing the dangers of excess, but to place 

 the matter on a sounder and more exact basis, 

 we need more investigations, particularly on 

 plants such as the plankton and the land forms 

 of the lower orders. 



The matter is becoming of great economic 

 importance, not only from the fact that life 

 insurance companies are finding less expect- 

 ancy of life in northern Europe ethnic types 

 too greatly out of adjustment to American 

 climates, but Retzius, in a recent address to 

 the British Anthropological Institute, has 

 called renewed attention to the long-known 

 fact that the northern blond type is unfit for 

 modern industrial life which is being carried 

 on by the brunet races. It has also long been 

 known that the blond types evolved for sur- 

 vival in northern outdoor employments in the 

 cloudy northwest corner of Europe, are so in- 

 jured by city life, that even as far north as 

 Glasgow, Scotland, they are being rapidly re- 

 placed by the. brunets, who in some way are 

 better guarded against factors fatal to the 



others. The disappearance of the blond type, 

 which Retzius predicts, is of course a baseless 

 absurdity. Indeed their numbers are con- 

 stantly increasing in Europe where they can 

 live, and immigration keeps up the proportion 

 here in spite of their higher death rate. It is 

 possible to lengthen their average life here, if 

 we will only realize what injures them. The 

 premature death of such great men as the late 

 Governor Johnson of Minnesota has a lesson 

 which American anthropologists should heed 

 now that Retzius and Beddoe have led the 

 way. But nothing can be done as long as we 

 consider man so supernatural that he is the 

 only species of living thing whose characters, 

 such as pigmentation, are meaningless freaks 

 of no survival value — an absurd view for which 

 the pre-Darwinian anthropologists are re- 

 sponsible — a view also derived from the old 

 theory that all present-day tj^pes are degener- 

 ate forms of prehistoric perfect adamites. 



So it is of much importance that all vital 

 phenomena in any way related to light inten- 

 sity should be investigated and explained. 

 The profusion of plankton in northern 

 climates and particularly in the cloudy and 

 foggy places, such as the North Sea and Banks 

 of Newfoundland, is therefore a more inter- 

 esting and important phenomenon than our 

 biologists seem to realize. In " The Effects of 

 Tropical Light on White Man," published in 

 1905, I collected all available data then found, 

 but in the succeeding five years much more 

 have been published which show that all racial 

 characters have survival value and some of 

 them are so important as to fit a type for a 

 very limited environment. Pigmentation is 

 of this nature, and so important that its ab- 

 sence is a bar to survival if the type migrates 

 to a very light country. In every knovsm case 

 of survival of the migrated blond race, it is 

 found to be due to the fact that it is in the 

 cloudy mountains such as the Alps, or in 

 northern Italy and Spain, even though it be 

 found by the side of brunets. It is not then 

 such a far cry from the northern richness of 

 phyto-plankton to the existence of large num- 

 bers of the sea-faring, Baltic type of man. 

 Chas. E. Woodruff 



