December 31, 1886.] 



SCIEJSCE. 



623 



maps. The educational value of these maps will 

 alone repay the people of Massachusetts over and 

 over again for their share in the cost of making 

 them. 



WHENCE COME RACE CHARACTERS? 



One is often led to speculate as to the origin of 

 national peculiarities ; and soon such speculations 

 take one to the conclusion that a great deal of 

 what characterizes a nation in the way of mental 

 traits is not an intrinsic quality of the race, but 

 akin rather to folk-lore, as to its origin at least. 

 There are modes of the mind, and fashions of 

 thought, which spread by propinquity. Such 

 modes may give currency to superstitious tales of 

 witchcraft, to foolish prejudices, or to great in- 

 tellectual impulses. Every mans mind is a coun- 

 try inhabited by ideas, very few of which are au- 

 tochthonous. His opinions are an immigrant 

 populace ; and, when a sturdy thought goes forth 

 from the mind of its birth, it breeds abundant 

 exact reproductions of itself in many other minds. 

 Indeed, most thinking is repetitive. So, when a 

 strong man appears, his example establishes a 

 tendency in those about him ; and, if he is highly 

 endowed, he founds a school perhaps, of poli- 

 tics, art, or science, as the case may be. If many 

 such men come in one epoch and in one nation, 

 it may well happen that their conjoint impulses 

 may lead a whole nation in a certain develop- 

 mental direction, without the qualities which be- 

 come prominent really being intrinsic race char- 

 acters. 



It is a legitimate question, and one possessed of 

 deep meaning. Are the Germans more musical in- 

 herently than other peoples, or has the succes- 

 sion of splendid musical geniuses among them at 

 once guided and acceleiated the musical culture 

 of the nation? The same alternative query arises 

 concerning the pre-eminence of Italian painting 

 or of English literature. Or we may make the 

 complementary inquiry. Does the lack of certain 

 qualities in a nation depend on the lack of the 

 right leaders ? To go back to the Germans, at 

 whom indeed we are aiming all the while, do 

 they lack American inventiveness because it is no- 

 wise in them, or merely because they have never 

 been rightly impelled into the habit of invention 

 by example-giving inventors ? Probably for the 

 latter reason, for German scientific men have 

 done their share in inventing scientific apparatus, 

 and the Germans who come to America learn to 

 invent. The final interest of these considerations 

 resides in the decision as to whether national de- 

 fects of cert ain kinds cannot be remedied by tui- 

 tion and right leadership. It must be left, however. 



for some powerful investigator to definitely solve 

 these problems by rigid historical research. Let 

 us, however, by an act of cheerful faith, accept 

 the belief in possible betterment even unto think- 

 ing that the German people may acquire the liter- 

 ary instinct. 



I have referred on several occasions in the 

 columns of Science to the absence of the 

 literary sense in German scientific men. It 

 is one of the most flagrant arguments against 

 the classical education, with its supposed re- 

 sults of literary culture, that the Germans, 

 who have school doses of classics much larger 

 and more concentrated than are administered in 

 the rest of the world, themselves write more 

 barbarously than any other civilized western people. 

 German scientific articles are full of sentences 

 like this, which refers to the bristles serving 

 among arthropods as organs of touch : " Man darf 

 fiir wahrscheinlich halten, dass die so sehr wech- 

 selnde gestalt und ausbildung der ' TasLborsten ' 

 nach der art des thieres und den korpergegenden 

 noch bestimmten nebenzwecken zu dienen hat, 

 ohne dass wir uns davon rechenschaft zu geben 

 vermogen." ^ Now, the author of this sentence is 

 one of the most distinguished and justly distin- 

 guished of German zoologists, but his manner of 

 writing is similar in quality to that of most sci- 

 entific writers in Germany. The sentence is 

 neither better nor worse than thousands upon 

 thousands of others, perpetrated by his country- 

 men equally without literary feeling. The Ger- 

 mans need literai'y conscience to reprove them 

 for all their awkward and involved phrases, that 

 their souls may know how guilty they are in ig- 

 noring their readers' rights. The quoted sentence 

 was evidently written without attention to the 

 forms of exj^ression. It never occurred to the 

 author that aught was due the reader. His mean- 

 ing cannot be had except by an efl'ort. It is ill- 

 mannered to give others so much trouble, when a 

 little pains on one's own part might save it. A 

 cultivated Frenchman would be incapable of such 

 a rudeness. The pith of the evil is the indiffer- 

 ence of the German author as to how he writes : 

 he feels no inward necessity of having a good 

 style, and is inclined to despise the French quali- 

 ties of grace and lucidity. 



Perhaps reiterated complaints will stimulate im- 

 pi'ovement. May it be brought about that the few 

 good writers among German savants will have 

 soon many imitators. It is, to be sure, more 

 trouble to write well than to write ill. We all 

 have facilities for bad logic, bungling rhetoric, and 

 poor composition ; but these undesirable gifts 

 ought not to excuse us from striving after their 

 1 Zoologischer anzeiger, ix, 288. 



