Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/343

 292 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899

has not succeeded in comprehending them. This is to be said in particular of his remarks on panmixia. According to Ammon, panmixia is an obstacle to selection, inasmuch as it leads to the gradual disappearance of the higher qualities in the course of generations. Weissmann, on the contrary, who coined the name of that process and set forth its action with great acuteness, tells us that it determines the disappearance of qualities and organs which have ceased to be useful to the individual in the struggle for life, and is therefore the inevitable condition to the production and development of other qualities or other organs rendered use- ful by the changed conditions of existence. 1 Thus, panmixia, far from being an obstacle to selection and to the evolution of the species, is the essential and integrating condition by which they are explained.

But let this pass, as well as the author's enthusiasm over the splendid offspring of princely marriages — an enthusiasm that is daily belied by well-known facts. There is one point, however, which we cannot dismiss unnoticed, namely, the vaunted physical and intellectual superiority of the wealthy classes, which the au- thor tries to impose as a universal anthropologic law. Certainly we cannot successfully defend the inverse thesis, as was done by Helvetius and Adam Smith, and today is reaffirmed by Biicher, namely, that the rich are not rich because they are intelligent, but that they are intelligent because they are rich ; in other words, that intellectual differences are solely the result of differ- ent social conditions. Surely this proposition contains more truth than the one which Ammon tries to support with rather feeble arguments. That noble and rich families, as he says, have produced a greater relative, not absolute, number of scientists and artists is not only possible but necessary, since only those families were able to give to their sons the education required to cultivate the liberal arts. Or can it be pretended, perhaps, that the sons of the poor, who at eight years, or even earlier, are

1 Weissmann : Aufs&tze fiber Vererbung^ Jena, 1892, pp. 559 ff.

AM. ANTH. N. S., X — IQ

�� �