Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/404

390 the other members of his family. To be metaphorical once more, one may say that a Robinson differs from a Jones because he is a mixture of brown peas and white peas; whereas one Jones differs from another in being a particular mixture of red beans and black beans, differently arranged in each case.

Next after the similarity between brothers and sisters or other blood-relations, we may expect to find the similarity between the offspring of the same class in the same community, similarly situated: and this the more so in proportion to the average identity of their several lives. For example, one would naturally expect that our own agricultural laborers, all engaged in much the same sort of work and surrounded by much the same sort of objects, would produce by intermarriage very similar children. Still more would this be the case among very homogeneous savages, such as the Esquimaux or the South American Indians. And where the identity of pursuits is very great on both sides, and in all individuals, as among the Fuegians, the Veddahs, the Andamanese, we should expect to find a great likeness of physique and character between all the offspring.

Conversely, where marriages take place between persons of different races, or very differently situated, we may look for great differences between the offspring, especially when compared with those of marriages between relatively homogeneous persons. Under such circumstances, the children tend more or less, though very irregularly, to present a mean between the two parents. Thus, to take the most obvious instance, the average mulatto is half-way as a rule between the negro and the European, physically at least, though, for various reasons to be considered hereafter, it often happens that he is more than the equal in intelligence of the average white. But even in the same family of mulattoes great differences exist between the children. Some will be darker, others lighter; some will be curlier-headed, others straighter-haired; some will have prognathous faces and depressed noses, others will have more regular features and more prominent noses. So far as my observation goes, too, it does not always happen that the most European physical type has the most European mind: on the contrary, high intelligence often accompanies a very African physique, while English features may be concomitant with a truly negro incapacity for logical reasoning, generalization, or elementary mathematical ideas. It seems as though in each part there was a struggle for supremacy between the two types: and the one type may apparently carry the day in certain external peculiarities, while the other type carries the day in the more intimate arrangements of the nervous system. At the same time, I can not myself doubt that there must be a very intimate connection between every one of the sense-organs and the brain; and I can hardly believe that prognathism and other like physical peculiarities do not imply various correlated nervous facts of great psychological importance. Though, in the