Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/77

Rh upon me to set forth in the present chapter something about the biological laws of interbreeding in man and in other animals. Following my subject logically as well as naturally, it is evident that this is the next question that presents itself for our consideration.

Within the last half-century or more so much light has been thrown upon all things that in any way relate to the origin of living forms upon this planet; their reproduction and multiplication; their development, growth, decadence and death; variation, the production of races, subspecies and species; natural selection, the survival of the fittest, and indeed, a score or more of other questions of the kind, that, with the abundant literature in the field upon such subjects, it would be quite superfluous to enter here in an argumentative way upon the discussion of any matters of this character. Much of it has now far outgrown the stage of hypothesis, and been relegated to the realm of law. The old superannuated Asiatic myth of special and miraculous creation has been long ago passed into the scientific waste-basket, and the story of the original pair, were they mice or of mankind, now figures in the minds of all informed people simply as a dogmatic pun, or a theological witticism. There is much that is transcendingly beautiful in nature, and we see it throughout both the animal and vegetable kingdoms, as well as in the inorganic world, yet notwithstanding all this, and the surpassing beauties of the garden in which we live and die, there is much, indeed, nearly all in nature, that is ordered upon a scheme of the most fiendish and implacable cruelty. " I have, also, often personified the word nature," says Darwin, " for I have found it difficult to avoid this ambiguity; but I