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294 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899 oughly recognizes the relations of emigration and immigration existing between the two fundamental economic classes, the poor and the rich, and justly attributes to these relations an eminent sociologic importance; yet it is not difficult to see that it gives a far from exact interpretation to the phenomena which it tries to elucidate. In reality, the surplus of the agricultural class that migrates to the city does not go to swell the rich class, but, at least immediately, the poorest and most abject class; they form the social residue of the great metropolis, the dregs of the fluctuating population—dock laborers, stone-breakers, beggars, drunkards, prostitutes. If some members of the destitute class succeed in rising to the ranks of the bourgeoisie, these fortunate ones are not exclusively recruited from among the immigrants from the country, but in large part from the city-born laboring population itself; and conversely, if it be true that some members of the well-to-do class lapse into poverty, they do not belong exclusively to the city population, but may be part of the country population. The fact is that the distinction, rather academic than positive, between city and country, unnecessarily encumbers and obscures the phenomenon of the changeable relations between the poor and the rich classes, a phenomenon which, considered in its real essence, amounts to this: that some members of the poor class, taking advantage of good wages, succeed in penetrating into the rich class, while some members of the latter, ruined by the processes of redistribution of wealth and by the degeneration which wealth at its height produces, drop down into the class beneath; whence arises a chassez-croisez among some members of one class and of the other, or a fractional mutation of the individuals of which the two classes are composed.

On the other hand, the theory of Jacoby may indeed explain the decomposition of one race, the degeneration of one people; but it cannot throw light on the much more important phenomenon of the dissolution of the social forms. Let us grant, in fact, that the ruin of imperial Rome, as Jacoby asserts and Ammon