Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/817

 SOCIAL ASSIMILATION 803

The belief that even a small infusion of foreign blood accom- plishes good results is often instanced by the Norman Conquest, but the truth is that the assimilation produced by the Normans was of a mental rather than a physiological character. Very little effect could have been produced on the Anglo-Saxons as a whole through intermarriage, owing to the relatively small num- ber of the Normans. The transformation of type into the English people was due to the effect of the superior continental civilization introduced by the Normans. Not all race-mixtures, moreover, have resulted in progress. Sicily, the meeting-ground of various races, has always been most unhappy. 1 Giddings sums up the latest thought on the subject thus :

Mixed races, after natural selection has eliminated their weaklings, are taller, stronger, more prolific, and more adaptable than pure races. Anthro- pologists differ in regard to the limits within which cross-breeding is advan- tageous. Prichard's opinion (Natural History of Man, p. 18) that hybrid offspring are equally prolific whether their parent stocks are similar or most dissimilar races is still held by many investigators. The consensus of the best judgment on this subject, however, supports the conclusion of J. C. Nott, that two resembling races produce fertile offspring, but that when very unlike races are crossed the offspring show an inherent tendency to sterility when kept apart from parent stocks (Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. 397). This is the belief of Vogt (Lectures on Man, p. 421) and of Professor Broca (Phenomena of Hybridity in Genus Homo, p. 60). On one point there is no dispute. Crossing creates physiological plasticity and variability. It is for this reason, indeed, that some hybrid races lack stability. Most of the ethnical elements that have mingled in civil societies have been sufficiently unlike to insure plasticity and individual vigor, and not so different as to impair the stability or the fertility of the resulting stock. 2

It is readily seen that there are two elements concerned in the. process of assimilation the active and the passive the assimilating people and those being assimilated. Consequently assimilation has a dual character is more or less reciprocal in its action a process of give and take to a greater or less degree. Attack is made by the assimilating people ; response is given by those to be assimilated, and upon the character of this response depends the amount of interaction between the elements.

1 MAYO-SMITH, "Assimilation of Nationalities in the United States," I, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. IX, pp. 430, 431. 'Principles, pp. 324, 325.