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 RACE AND MARRIAGE 445

a class as distinct from the natives as from the Europeans. A Eurasian rarely marries a native and this prejudice is said to be shared in equal measure by the natives. ^'^

Some races. are so plastic as to be capable of ready assimila- tion without apparent injury. Those groups will most easily approximate the status of others which are most free from deeply fixed habits and settled prejudices. The existence of complex or rigid social ideals acts as a bar to harmonious adjustment even where diversity of physique is not present. On the other hand there are races that are prepotent in both physique and culture. Their superior fusing power is manifested in the rapid trans- formation to their own type of the stocks with which they com- bine. It but rarely happens that two stocks blend on a basis of practical equality. When this does occur the offspring may be superior to either parent type in physique or cultural worth or both. When Germans and Irish in America intermarry a breed results which combines most of the desirable qualities of both, and which, incidentally, approximates closely the native American type. Chinese-Filipino and Chinese-Malay mixed breeds are su- perior to the offspring of Spaniards and Malays. ^^ The hybrids that result from the crossing of Europeans and negroes, while superior to the negro mentally, are his inferiors in physique and stability.

The degree of fecundity in race crossing is generally clearly correlated with the degree of cultural difference between the parent stocks. As captivity or change of environment lessens the fertility of most animals and plants, so human fecundity and vitality may be diminished by transition to an alien mode of life. Darwin notes that, while domesticated elephants in India gener- ally do not breed, in Ava, where the females are allowed to roam in the forests under somewhat natural conditions, they sometimes bear offspring. It was formerly contended that Australian women were infertile with Europeans, but this is now definitely

"' Sara Jeannette Duncan, Popular Science Monthly, XLII, 3.

excel in school studies, but the Chinese-Dyak half-breeds are superior in hard work and in play: The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo, I, 124.
 * Ling Roth reports that children of predominantly Chinese blood in Borneo