Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of ScienceAllen, Grant
Science
Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Allen, Grant
Science
Suppose a country inhabited in its interior by a savage race of hunters
and fighters, and on its seaboard by an equally savage race of pirates
and fishermen, like the Dyaks of Borneo. Each of these races, if left to
itself, will develop in time its own peculiar and special type of savage
cleverness. Each (in the scientific slang of the day) will adapt itself
to its particular environment. The people of the interior will acquire
and inherit a wonderful facility in spearing monkeys and knocking down
parrots; while the people of the sea-coast will become skilful managers
of canoes upon the water, and merciless plunderers of one another's
villages, after the universal fashion of all pirates. These original
differences of position and function will necessarily entail a thousand
minor differences of intelligence and skill in a thousand different
ways. For example, the sea-coast people, having of pure need to make
themselves canoes and paddles, will probably learn to decorate their
handicraft with ornamental patterns; and the aesthetic taste thus aroused
will, no doubt, finally lead them to adorn the facades of their wooden
huts with the grinning skulls of slaughtered enemies, prettily disposed
at measured distances. A thoughtless world may laugh, indeed, at these
naive expressions of the nascent artistic and decorative faculties in
the savage breast, but the aesthetic philosopher knows how to appreciate
them at their true worth, and to see in them the earliest ingenuous
precursors of our own Salisbury, Lichfield, and Westminster.
Now, so long as these two imaginary races of ours continue to remain
distinct and separate, it is not likely that idiosyncrasies or varieties
to any great extent will arise among them. But, as soon as you permit
intermarriage to take place, the inherited and developed qualities of
the one race will be liable to crop up in the next generation, diversely
intermixed in every variety of degree with the inherited and developed
qualities of the other. The children may take after either parent in any
combination of qualities whatsoever. You have admitted an apparently
capricious element of individuality: a power on the part of the
half-breeds of differing from one another to an extent quite impossible
in the two original homogeneous societies. In one word, you have made
possible the future existence of diversity in character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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