Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/584

580 with succeeding generations. We now know that skin color in inheritance follows in general Mendelian laws of inheritance, frequently giving rise to white and black "sports" in every large family of mulatto children. In accordance with Mendelian principles, the result of a white-negro cross is always brown-skinned, the dark skin color dominating. "White" and "black" skin colors are a pair of unit characters. White color means the absence of the determiner for deep pigmentation in the germ-plasm; dark skin is due to the presence of such determiner. When first generation hybrids intermarry, in an appropriately large family there will appear invariably one or several children lighter than either parent, and one or several darker; that is, the "lighter" and the "darker" have reverted to the grandparental character for skin color. This reveals the fact of a segregation of the determiners of skin color in the germ-cells, producing a purity of gametes.

We are now in possession of facts, thanks mainly to the labors of Professor Karl Pearson and his collaborators at the Galton Eugenics Laboratory, and to Professor Davenport and his staff of assistants at the Eugenics Record Office, showing that the inheritance of several scores of human physical and mental traits are in close conformity with Mendelian formulæ. There is no countervailing fact, and there is much precise and yet more suggestive data, to the assumption that many of the really desirable negro traits (e. g., physical strength, resistance or relative immunity to certain infections, capacity for routine, cheerful temperament, vivid imagination, rhythmic and melodic endowment, etc.) are of the nature of unit characters and as such may be transmitted according to fixed laws by simple control of matings.

If a demi-god could thus experiment with human crosses, as biologists now do with animal breeds, a pure race could undoubtedly be established combining the best elements of the negro and the white. I am well aware that little could probably be actually accomplished under present social conditions, even if it were not morally inimical, to make the experiment by legal control of negro and mulatto crosses. But some little could be accomplished by education and the arousing of the sentiment of colored racial pride. The point seems clear that in the presence of 2,000,000 mulattoes, steadily increasing in number, of relatively superior worth to the pure negro, we have a key to the solution of our problem. The mulatto is the leaven with which to lift the negro race. He serves as our best lever for negro elevation. The mulatto does not feel the instinctive mental nausea to negro mating. He might even be made to feel a sacred mission in this respect. The negro aspires to be mulatto, the mulatto to be white. These aspirations are worthy, and should be encouraged. Possibility of marriage