The science of the Darwinian age met this question with an easy assurance. How superficial, how glib, how mechanistic the conception with which it worked! In the first place, this conception groups an aggregate of such grossly palpable characters as are observable in the anatomy of the discoveries--that is, characters that even a corpse displays. As to observing the body qua living thing, there is no question of it. Secondly, it investigates only those signs which very little perspicacity is needed to detect, and investigates them only in so far as they are measurable and countable. The microscope and not the pulse-sense determines. When language is used as a differentia, it is to classify races, not according to their _way of speaking_, but according to the grammatical _structure of the speech_, which is just anatomy and system of another sort. No one as yet has perceived that the investigation of these _speech-races_ is one of the most important tasks that research can possibly set itself. In the actuality of daily experience we all know perfectly well that the way of speaking is one of the most distinctive traits in present-day man--examples are legion; each of us knows any number of them. In Alexandria the same Greek was spoken in the most dissimilar race-modes, as we can see even to-day from the script of the texts. In North America the native-born speak exactly alike, whether in English, in German, or for that matter in Indian. What in the speech of East-European Jews is a race-trait of the land, and present therefore in Russian also, and what is a race-trait of the blood common to all Jews, independent of their habitat and their hosts, in their speaking of any of the European “mother”-tongues? What in detail are the relations of the sound-formations, the accentuations, the placing of words? But science has completely failed to note that race is not the same for rooted plants as it is for mobile animals, that with the microcosmic side of life a fresh group of characters appears, and that for the animal world it is decisive. Nor again has it perceived that a completely different significance must be attached to “races” when the word denotes subdivisions _within the integral race “Man.”_ With its talk of adaptation and of inheritance it sets up a soulless causal concatenation of superficial characters, and blots out the fact that here the blood and there the power of the land over the blood are expressing themselves--secrets that cannot be inspected and measured, but only livingly experienced and felt from eye to eye.