Most striking of all, they still do this in the old Norse fashion as nearly as possible. In one district these farmers combined their efforts some sixty years ago and built a ship which, since that time, has sailed every year to South Africa, carrying there the surplus sons in search of new domains for themselves. In that far country their spirit of independence finds satisfaction in establishing new homesteads, new families of the individualistic type, and in perpetuating their traditions of enterprise and self-reliance. It is because the modern Scandinavians are of the same stock, fashioned for long ages by the same physical environment, that they have continued to emigrate in large numbers to North America, where some of their ancestral race landed centuries before Columbus was born, and where, in the newly opened territories of Canada and the United States, they are generally recognised as being among the best of the settlers. Demolins does not enter into the question—How did the institutions and mode of life of these or other peoples, determined by physical environment, bring about adaptation of racial qualities to the environment? He seems to assume in all cases use-inheritance. But if, as seems possible or even probable, this is a false assumption, we may still see clearly that, in the case of the Northmen at least, adaptation may well have been effected by selection. The conditions of life of these Northmen were such that in each generation the majority of men could become fathers of families only after carrying through successfully an enterprise in which a bold independence of spirit was the prime condition of success.