handicaps environment may offer and overcomes all obstacles, there are many evidences. "The trend of the whole investigation has been in the general direction of showing that great men have been produced by the cooperation of two causes, genius and opportunity, and that neither alone can accomplish it. But genius is a constant factor, very abundant in every rank of life, while opportunity is a variable factor and chiefly artificial. As such it is something that can be supplied practically at will. The actual manufacture, therefore, of great men, of the agents of civilization, of the instruments of achievement, is not a utopian conception but a practical undertaking." 32 This quotation is taken from "Applied Sociology" by Lester F. Ward, in which is to be found the most careful and critical examination of the evidence on this subject with which the writer is familiar. It is particularly valuable because it puts in available form a digest of an important and little known work by a French student, Odin. Odin found, on studying the French men of letters during a period of several centuries, that neither density of population, nor race, nor social position were determinative; but rather opportunity. As he puts it: "We have thus arrived, by a series of careful approaches and eliminations, at the conclusion that the fecundity of the respective localities in remarkable men of letters rests essentially upon the educational resources that they place within the reach of their occupants.' "33 About 98 per cent of the men had enjoyed exceptional training and opportunity in childhood as well as in later life. Odin does not make 32 WARD, L. F. Applied Sociology, p. 220. 33 Ibid., p. 213. Galton's mistake of ignoring the women, and he finds the same rule to hold. Over half of the women writers of note came from Paris where the greatest opportunities were offered. Clarke comes to similar conclusions in his study of American men of letters. One needs only to consider the growth in the United States in the last century, the marvelous inventions and discoveries, the tremendous strides, not only in providing education for women, but their advent into fields hitherto closed to them (not only because of their sex but also because of their reputed inability to do the things done by their brothers) to realize that talent, whether rare as Galton thought or common as Ward believed, must develop in accord with opportunity. Heredity then furnishes the basis and sets the limits to the development. Environment must furnish the stimulus and the opportunity. Heredity determines what a man may become, but environment determines what he does become. Here biology has one great lesson to teach. Problems of heredity cannot be solved by changing the environment, nor can society wait for some happy variation ere it utilizes the new factors in its own surroundings. The feeble-minded child may be trained to the limits of its capacity but it never becomes normal nor are its children improved. The various factors that enter into that complex we call social progress, will be elsewhere considered. SUGGESTIONS FOR READING CASTLE, W. E., et al. Heredity and Eugenics. 1912. DAVENPORT, C. B. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. 1911. 66 The Task of Social Hygiene. 1912. GALTON, F. Hereditary Genius (2nd Ed., 1892). 1869. 66 Natural Inheritance. 1889. GODDARD, H. H. The Kallikak Family. 1913. 66 Feeble-mindedness. 1914. The Human Harvest. 1907. GUYER, M. F. Being Well-Born. 1916. JORDAN, D. S. KELLICOTT, W. E. The Social Direction of Human Evolution. 1912. LOMBROSO, C. The Man of Genius (English text). 1891. LYDSTON, G. F. The Diseases of Society and Degeneracy. 1904. MOTT, F. W. Heredity and Eugenics in Relation to Insanity. 1912. PEARSON, K. (Ed.). The Treasury of Human Inheritance. 1912. Report of First International Conference on Eugenics. Problems in Eugenics, 1912. Report of First National Conference on Race Betterment. Battle Creek, 1914. RHODES, F. A. The Next Generation. 1916. SALEEBY, C. W. Parenthood and Race Culture. 1909. SCHUSTER, E. Eugenics. 1912. WARD, L. F. Applied Sociology. 1906. WHETHAM, MR. and MRS. W. C. D. Heredity and Society. 1912. WINSHIP, A. E. The Jukes-Edwards Families. 1900. WOODS, F. A. Heredity in Royalty. 1906. CHAPTER VII RACE DIFFERENCES To the superficial observer all birds of a given species look alike. In reality they are not alike and it is possible to subdivide the species into many classes or races by grouping together those having the given characters. Our common little screech-owl sometimes has a reddish plumage, sometimes gray plumage, even in the same locality; but apart from color the two seem to be identical. The beautiful woodpeckers known as flickers or yellow hammers have a golden-yellow cast of plumage in the eastern part of North America. In the west, however, the yellow feathers are replaced by red plumes and the bird is given a very different appearance. Again, aside from this we cannot distinguish them, and every combination exists from the extreme yellow type to the extreme red. The same is true of meadow-larks, blackbirds, many warblers, tits and tanagers as well as of such different animals as squirrels, foxes and bears. Because of our recognition of these races or subspecies, exact classification is in many ways more difficult than it was in the days of Linnæus. In earlier days it was supposed that such variations as were known had been directly caused by conditions of soil and climate. Now, as we have seen, the evidence is against this idea, and we have come to believe that variation has been produced by new germ cell combinations. It may still be true that some of these mutants are better fitted to survive under given conditions and will therefore have an advantage over other types and tend to replace them. In other cases the character in question seems to have no possible significance in so far as survival is concerned. We can see no difference in the yellow and the red types of flickers in so far as strength or fitness to exist is concerned. They are different, that is all. When we turn our attention to the human species we find the same phenomena. "The genus Homo has but one existing species: Homo sapiens. And this species . . . is fairly divisible into four subspecies, all of which are so fertile in their crossbreeding with one another that they have in the course of time given rise to many transitional races and intermediary types, so much so that only about two-thirds of the living peoples of today can be decisively allotted to one or other of the definite subspecies. The remaining third comprises the long-established mongrel, hybrid races formed by the mixture of some or even of all of these four divisions of the existing human species. These distinguishable subspecies are: 1. The Australoid, nearest of all living men to the ancestral Human, to the paleolothic man of Europe and North Africa; and to the possible parent thereof - Homo primigenius, the man of Neanderthal and Heidelberg, of the Corrèze, of Spy, Krapina, and Gibraltar. 2. The Negro. 3. The Caucasian or European, possibly descended in a direct line from the Australoid or basal stock, with which in any case it is closely allied. 4. The Mongolic or Asiamerican. |