civilization, and through these from Phœnician and Egyptian. The Egyptians, needless to say, were a branch of the Hamites, the most degraded white race of our time; the Phœnicians, on the other hand, were Semites, and it was another Semitic race, the Arab, that during the Middle Ages held the light of civilization, and transmitted to us the inheritance of antiquity, after having widely extended its scientific uses. The whole history of our civilization, therefore, protests against its having ever been at any time monopolized by the Aryan branch of the white race. Modern ethnography, based upon recent linguistic and anthropological discoveries, has shaken to its foundations those notions concerning the white races which were universally accepted in bygone times. We no longer hold that it was from the high plateau of Asia that swept those tribes who eventually peopled Europe, but that they radiated from the centre of Europe herself. Far from forming the majority of the inhabitants of the Continent, the Aryans, if that term still preserves its meaning, are but one of its elements. They have mingled everywhere in variable quantities among the different hordes of Finnish and other races who have overrun our continent. The varied formation of the skulls which has been observed among the different inhabitants of a single country corresponds with the predominance of one or other of these original elements, with the result that the unity of race which has hitherto been imagined to exist among all Western peoples is now proved to be chimerical. Whatever truth these theories may contain, they are nevertheless subject to frequent modification, but it seems impossible with the present facts to sustain _à priori_ that one race cannot assimilate the civilization of another. No doubt the Japanese differ more completely from the Europeans of the West than do the Russians, or even the Arabs, or than they themselves do from the Chinese; but once the unity of the human race is admitted, this becomes a mere question of degree of parentage. Must we, therefore, draw a line of degree between peoples beyond which the transmission of the civilization of the one cannot penetrate to the other, even as the French law fixes a limit to the transmission of inheritance? Nothing short of experience can solve the question. For the matter of that, the phenomenon is constantly taking place before our eyes, and if there be a people who might attempt it with hope of success, it is surely the Japanese, who to exceptional intelligence and remarkable powers of assimilation add a great spirit of enterprise and an uncommon energy.