Page:Rowland--The Mountain of Fears.djvu/64

  "Odd," continued Leyden, clinging with Teutonic persistency to his theory, conscious but unaffected by his exquisite surroundings. "The popular idea is that an individual having a drop of African blood is more negro than white, even though the white predominates, as in the case of a quadroon or octoroon. This is wrong, Doctor. The white is by far the more potent strain, but, because it is more apt to color the mind than the skin, it is not recognized as such."

"Primitive organizations are usually more virile," I began.

"It is not of the physical but of the mental that I speak?" he interrupted, a bit testily. "It is an undeserved compliment to the negro and an unjust insult to the white to claim that a man having an equal amount of both strains is more black than white, but if the white strain is Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian, then he is both white and black, and all of each, for they will mix no more than oil and water." [ 48 ]