218 KEPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1887. 



ical and functional fitness with functional and mechanical requirements. 

 But resemblances of this kiud are not those which are contemplated in 

 anthropometry, where the relations of structure and function, and of 

 those to the conditions of life, have been disregarded in a search for 

 morphological constants, whose occurrence, under the circumstances, 

 was biologically impossible. Much but not all has been done towards 

 a science of man, when the divergent forms of his class have been 

 united by forms that are intermediate, and when his pedigree has been 

 reconstructed on the basis of kinship. The whole question of race is 

 included in this generalization, although it is not thereby fully ex- 

 plained, neither is it likely to be elucidated by measurements. 



Without pursuing tbe subject further it may be remarked that, ab- 

 stractly, structure and function are determined in all organisms by the 

 affinities of their units of composition ; that complete homogeneity in 

 a group of protoplasts is impossible, and that initial diversities will in- 

 crease during evolution. The minuteness of these ultimates may not 

 add to the difficulty of comprehension more than is the case witb those 

 dealt with by molecular physics and chemistry, but it is otherwise when 

 the plasticity of life is added. That adaptation is connected with 

 changes in function and structure is obvious, but neither in an organ- 

 ism, an organ, nor in the plastidules which compose them, is adaptation 

 a final term in the progress from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from 

 simplicity to complexity, from indefiniteness to definiteness ; since, with- 

 out alteration of elementary composition, there are no conceivable cir- 

 cumstances under which re-adjustment can be effected. 



As it is with these phenomena which lie at the foundation of life, so 

 is it with all the vital phenomena to which natural and sexual selection, 

 growth, survival, genesis, heredity apply. Amid all degrees of compo- 

 sition and recomposition, function constitutes the substance, adapta- 

 tion the form of life. Every statical or dynamical distribution of or- 

 ganic energy by which incident forces are met is included in function ; 

 and though in large groups of organisms, correlative changes, structural 

 and functional, occur slowly and within comparatively narrow limits, 

 yet they are, in the nature of things, relatively indefinite, but contin- 

 gently permanent, and do not afford on this subject tbe data which sys- 

 tematic ethnology Tequires. Not less than its co-ordinate, the evolution 

 of form, does physiological development press for interpretation in every 

 question relating to race, and the doctrine that all factors by which dif- 

 ferences among men are worked out are resolvable into results of tbe in- 

 tercourse between these and tbe conditions under which they are placed, 

 is essentially a corollary from the persistence of force. 



Space lias permitted but the merest sketch of this subject, but there 

 yet remains a question which sooner or later confronts tbe investigator 

 of cranial deformities, and this is that of their transmission. Present 

 opinion almost unanimously opposes the belief that these may, in any 



