Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/499

Rh France apply this last-named criterion of progress? I doubt not we should find it to accord with all the facts we have instanced above. To ascribe them to racial causes is to lose sight of the primary factors in social evolution.

Our theory, then, is this: that most of the social phenomena we have noted as peculiar to the areas occupied by the Alpine type are the necessary outcome, not of racial proclivities, but rather of the geographical and social isolation characteristic of the habitat of this race. The ethnic type is still pure for the very same reason that social phenomena are primitive. We discover, primarily, an influence of environment where others perceive phenomena of ethnic inheritance. In the preceding paragraph we have referred to the apparently disintegrating influence of social evolution upon domestic institutions. Let us for a moment turn to another phase of family life in France, in order to illustrate the complex forces which play upon it to-day. The danger of rashly generalizing from inadequate data will be immediately apparent.

An index of the solidarity of the family is afforded by the degree to which it resents the interference of the state in its domestic affairs. A similar expression of the force of family feeling is often rendered through the tenacity with which it holds itself aloof from the intrusion of strangers not allied by blood or adoption to the other members of the naturally close corporation. In other words, statistics of what we may call "home families," or families occupying an entire dwelling by themselves, give us a clew to the cohesiveness of the institution. It is the question of the boarding house and the tenement versus the home. Any direct comparison in this respect between different parts of the same country is of course entirely worthless, unless we take account of the relative proportions of city population in each; for, always and everywhere, it is in the crowded city that the "home" is superseded by its degenerate prototypes. Fortunately, we possess for France data upon this subject, with the necessary elimination of this cause of error. The accompanying map shows the proportion of families occupying each a whole house to itself, and with the exclusion of all cities of upward of ten thousand inhabitants in every case. In other words, we have before our eyes statistics of the separately existing families among the French peasantry.

Inspection of this map of "home families" shows the widest range of variation. Some parts of France, notably Brittany, exhibit twice the degree of domestic intermixture, so to speak, that prevails in other regions. On the whole, the northwest manifests a weaker opposition to the intrusion of strangers in the family circle than does the south. In some respects this agrees with the