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Rh that is, characters that even a corpse displays. As to observing the body qua living thing, there is no question of it. Secondly, it investigates only those signs which very little perspicacity is needed to detect, and investigates them only in so far as they are measurable and countable. The microscope and not the pulse-sense determines. When language is used as a differentia, it is to classify races, not according to their way of speaking, but according to the grammatical structure of the speech, which is just anatomy and system of another sort. No one as yet has perceived that the investigation of these speech-races is one of the most important tasks that research can possibly set itself. In the actuality of daily experience we all know perfectly well that the way of speaking is one of the most distinctive traits in present-day man — examples are legion; each of us knows any number of them. In Alexandria the same Greek was spoken in the most dissimilar race-modes, as we can see even to-day from the script of the texts. In North America the native-born speak exactly alike, whether in English, in German, or for that matter in Indian. What in the speech of East-European Jews is a race-trait of the land, and present therefore in Russian also, and what is a race-trait of the blood common to all Jews, independent of their habitat and their hosts, in their speaking of any of the European "mother"-tongues? What in detail are the relations of the sound-formations, the accentuations, the placing of words?

But science has completely failed to note that race is not the same for rooted plants as it is for mobile animals, that with the microcosmic side of life a fresh group of characters appears, and that for the animal world it is decisive. Nor again has it perceived that a completely different significance must be attached to "races" when the word denotes subdivisions within the integral race "Man." With its talk of adaptation and of inheritance it sets up a soulless causal concatenation of superficial characters, and blots out the fact that here the blood and there the power of the land over the blood are expressing themselves — secrets that cannot be inspected and measured, but only livingly experienced and felt from eye to eye.

Nor are the scientists at one as to the relative rank of these superficial characters amongst themselves. Blumenbach classified the races of man according to skull-forms, Friedrich Müller (as a true German) by hair and language-structure, Topinard (as a true Frenchman) by skin-colour and shape of nose, and Huxley (as a true Englishman) by, so to say, sport characteristics. This last is undoubtedly in itself a very suitable criterion, but any judge of horses would tell him that breed-characteristics cannot be hit off by scientific terminology. These "descriptions" of races are without exception as worthless as the descriptions of "wanted" men on which policemen exercise their theoretical knowledge of men.

Obviously, the chaotic in the total expression of the human body is not in the least realized. Quite apart from smell (which for the Chinese, for example,