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kinds of future conditions by means of hidden inner predispositions, by the help of which they may maintain themselves and be adapted to diversities of climate or soil, is truly marvelous. It gives rise, in the course of the migration and change of environment of animals and plants, to what seem to be new species; but these are nothing more than races of the same species, the germs and natural predispositions for which (deren Keime und natürliche Anlagen) have developed themselves in different ways as occasion arose in the course of long ages.

Kant's conception of the "grounds" for the existence of these Anlagen is manifestly teleological in the most naïve way; the species was fitted out beforehand with distinct elements in its germ-plasm in order to furnish its later representatives against specific contingencies that had not yet arisen, and in some cases never would arise. This idea Kant elaborates in detail in the case of the skin-color of the negro; the passage is so delightful a combination of teleological "explanation" and phlogistic chemistry that it deserves to be quoted:

Such, then, are reasons why our African brother is black and has a distinctive odor.

Kant's principles of the fixity of the specific type and the essential unmodifiability of the "reproductive faculty" imply that the diverse heritable and adaptive characters of what he calls "varieties," no less than those of races, preexist in the species ready-made from the outset, in the form of special "germs" or Anlagen. In writing the "Physical Geography" and the "Conception of Race" Kant does not seem to have