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Early Anthropological Researches   81

research, which science is only slowly, if surely, investigating forty years later.

To illustrate what he means by" mental aptitudes" Galton refers to those of the American Indian and of the Negro; both have been reared under the most different environments from the North to the South of the world, and again under the most diverse social and political institutions, yet in all their essential mental characteristics they remain Red Man and Negro. Nature, as Galton later expressed it, is ever dominant over nurture. The Red Man has everywhere great patience, great reticence, great dignity, yet he has the minimum of affectionate and social qualities compatible with the continuance of his race.

"The Negro has strong impulsive passions, and neither patience, reticence nor dignity. He is warmhearted, loving towards his master's children and idolised by the children in return. He is eminently gregarious, for he is always jabbering, quarrelling, tom-tom-ing and dancing.

He is remarkably domestic, and is endowed with such constitutional vigour, and is so prolific that his race is irrepressible." (p. 321.)

The characterisation Galton .gives of Red Man and Negro-briefly resumed above-has been equalled, if scarcely bettered, by other arnthropologists, but it remained for him to draw the essential conclusions that if the Negro is more unlike the Red Man in his mind than in his body, and this holds for all the environments in which you find them, then a race is a race because mental and moral characteristics are hereditary, and heredity will maintain these features dominating the slight, we might almost say superficial, effects of the most varied environment.

"Our bodies, minds and capabilities of development have been derived from them [our forefathers]. Everything we possess at our birth is a heritage from our ancestors." (p. 321.)

Galton next turns to the question whether habits acquired by the parents can be inherited by their offspring, and discusses it at length.

"I cannot ascertain that the son of an old soldier learns his drill more quickly than the son of an artizan. I am assured that the sons of fishermen, whose ancestors have pursued the same calling time out of mind, are just as sea-sick as the sons of landsmen when they first go to sea."

Galton rejects the inheritance of acquired characters whether mental or physical. Then, if in vague language, he propounds a doctrine probably for the first time in the history of science, which amounts to the theory of the continuity of the germ plasm. He boldly asserts 'that there is nothing in the embryo of an individual that was not in the embryos of its parents; that all the parental life from embryo to adult age, and from that to senility, has contributed nothing to the offspring embryo.

"We shall therefore take an approximately correct view of -the origin of our life, if we consider our own embryos to have sprung immediately from those embryos whence our parents were developed, and these from the embryos of their parents, and so on for ever. We should

in this way look on the nature of mankind, and perhaps on that of the whole animated creation, as one continuous system, ever pushing out new branches in all directions, that variously interlace, and that bud into separate lives at every point of interlacement."

"This simile does not at all express the popular notion of life. Most persons seem to have a vague idea that a new element, specially fashioned in heaven and not transmitted by simple descent, is introduced into the body of every newly-born infant. Such a notion is unfitted to

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