GERMINAL SELECTION 145 



intelligible enough on the- assumption of persistent germinal selection 

 aided by panmixia. The jaws and teeth in these spoilt pets no longer 

 require to be maintained at the level of strengtli and sliarpness 

 essential to their ancestors which depended on these characters, and 

 so they fell below it, became smaller and weaker, but could n(jt 

 disappear altogether, for the process of degeneration was Ijrouolit, or 

 is being brought, to a standstill by the intervention of personal 

 selection. 



Even the lower jaw in Man is declared by many authors to be 

 degenerate. Collins found that the lower jaw of the modern Eiiglisli- 

 man was one- ninth smaller than that of the ancient Briton, and one-lialf 

 smaller than that of the Australians ; Flower showed that we are a 

 microdont race like the Egyptians, w^hile the Chinese, Indians, Malays, 

 and Negroes are mesodont, and the Andamanese, Melanese, Australians, 

 and Tasmanians are macrodont. This does not of itself imply that 

 we exhibit a degeneration of dentition, though this conclusion is 

 hinted at by other facts, such as the variability of the wisdom-teeth. 

 It need not surprise us, indeed, that a retrogressive variation tendency 

 should have started in this case, for, with higher culture and more 

 refined methods of eating, the claims which personal selection was 

 obliged to make on the dentition have been greatly diminished, and 

 germinal selection would thus intervene. 



Every one knows how the quality of human teeth has deterior- 

 ated w^ith culture, and this not in the higher classes only, but even 

 among the peasantry, as Amnion has observed. The time is past 

 when raw flesh was a dainty, and when bad teeth meant poor 

 nutrition, if not actual starvation. Even nowadays famine plays a 

 terrible and periodically recurrent role as an eliminator among some 

 negroid races. 



Many other organs in man have been reduced from tlieir former 

 pitch of perfection through culture, and some of them are still in 

 process of dwindling. When I fornndated the idea of panmixia and 

 applied it to explain cases which had previously been referred to tlie 

 inheritance of the results of disuse, I regarded the short-siglitedness of 

 civilized Man from this point of view. My opinion aroused lively 

 opposition at the time, especially on the part of oculists, who very 

 emphatically referred the phenomenon to tlie inheritance of acquired 

 shortsight, and indeed regarded it as a proof of the transmission 

 of functional modifications. 



But, apart from the fact that the assumption of this mode of 

 inheritance must now be regarded not only as uni)roved, but as 

 contradicted by reliable data, panmixia, in conjunction witli tlie 

 II. L 



