Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/607

Rh wholly cast off the leading strings of physical circumstance, as it is our purpose ultimately to show.

By this time it will have been observed that the differences in respect of the head form become strongly noticeable only when we compare the extremes of our racial series; in other words, that while the minor gradations may be real to the calipers and tape, they are not striking at first glance to the eye. As a matter of fact, it is the modesty of this physical trait—not forcing itself conspicuously upon the observer's notice as do differences in the color of the skin, the facial features, or the bodily stature—which forms the main basis of its claim to priority as a test of race. Were the head form as strikingly prominent as these other physical traits, it would tend to fall a prey to the modifying factor of artificial selection: that is to say, it would speedily become part and parcel among a people of a general ideal, either of racial beauty or of economic fitness, so that the selective choice thereby induced would soon modify the operation of purely natural causes. However strenuously the biologists may deny validity to this element of artificial selection among the lower animals, it certainly plays a large part in influencing sexual choice among primitive men and more subtly among us in civilization. Just as soon as a social group recognizes the possession of certain physical traits peculiar to itself—that is, as soon as it evolves what Prof. Giddings has aptly termed a "consciousness of kind"—its constant endeavor thenceforth is to afford the fullest expression to that ideal. Thus the nobility in Japan are as much lighter in weight and more slender in build than their lower classes as the Teutonic nobility of Great Britain is above the British average. The Japanese aristocracy in consequence might soon come to consider its bodily peculiarities as a sign of high birth. That it would thereafter love, choose, and marry—unconsciously perhaps, but no less effectively—in conformity with that idea is beyond per adventure.

Is there any doubt that where, as in our own Southern States, two races are socially divided from one another, the superior would do all in his power to eliminate any traces of physical similarity to the menial negroes? Might not the Roman nose, light hair and eyes, and all those prominent traits which distinguished the master from the slave, play an important part in constituting an ideal of beauty which would become highly effective in the course of time? So uncultured a people as the natives of Australia are pleased to term the Europeans, in derision, "tomahawk-noses," regarding our primary facial trait as absurd in its make-up. Even among them the "consciousness of kind" an not be denied as an important factor to be dealt with in the theory of the formation of races.