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INAUGURAL ADDRESS. o 
incipient species. This is a celebrated difficulty with 
eritics of Darwinian evolution, and was first forcibly 
pointed out by the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin, of 
Edinburgh, in the North British Review for 1867.* Prof. 
Jenkin gives the following illustration of his argument :— 
“Suppose a white man to have been wrecked on an island inhabited by 
negroes, and to have established himself in friendly relations with a powerful 
tribe whose customs he has learnt. Suppose him to possess the physical 
strength, energy and ability of a dominant white race, and let the food and 
climate of the island suit his constitution; grant him every advantage which 
We can conceive a white man to possess over the native; concede that im the 
struggle for existence his chance of a long life will be much superior to that of 
the native chiefs. Yet from all these admissions there does not follow the con- 
clusion that after a limited or unlimited number of generations the inhabitants 
of the island will be white. Our shipwrecked hero would probably become 
king; he would kill a great many blacks in the struggle for existence; he 
would have a great many wives and children, while many of his subjects would 
live and die as bachelors; an insurance company would accept his life at 
perhaps one-tenth of the premium which they would exact from the most 
favoured of the negroes. Our white’s qualities would certainly tend very much 
to preserve him to a good old age; and yet he would not suffice in any number 
of generations to turn his subjects’ descendants white. It may be said that the 
white colour is not the cause of the superiority. True; but it may be used 
simply to bring before the senses the way in which qualities belonging to one 
individual in a large number must be gradually obliterated. In the first 
generation there will be some dozens of intelligent young mulattoes, much 
superior in average intelligence to the negroes. We might expect the throne 
for some generations to be occupied by a more or less yellow king; but can any 
one believe that the whole island will gradually acquire a white or even a 
yellow population, or that the islanders would acquire the energy, courage, 
ingenuity, patience, self-control, endurance, in virtue of which qualities our 
hero killed so many of their ancestors, and begot so many children; those 
virtues, in fact, which the struggle for existence would select, if it could select 
anything?” 
This ingenious story of Professor Jenkin’s certainly puts 
the supposed swamping effect which free intercrossing has 
upon an individual variation very forcibly, but we must 
* See ‘‘ Papers, Literary, Scientific, &c.,” vol i., p. 229, 1887. 
