breeding more or less true, national characteristics are vulgarly attributed to blood which are undoubtedly the result of circumstance. A Jew severed from his social atmosphere and brought up in a society in which wealth was at a discount and scientific and literary attainment at a premium, would no doubt turn that intellectual fertility which is the gift of his blood into those directions; and though his descendants would undoubtedly inherit his nose, they would probably show no inherent tendency to lend money at sixty per cent. When, therefore, a cross takes place between Europeans of different nationalities, if the resulting offspring should revert to the parent stock from which both arose, his reversion will carry him no further back than a few thousand years (which in matters of racial development is but yesterday afternoon!) to those common Aryan ancestors of the race who were probably endowed with as much social feeling and perhaps more courage than their latest descendants. In truth, so homogeneous are the majority of Europeans in blood that a cross between two nationalities is of the same nature as that which takes place when farmers, having flocks of the same breed which they have inbred for several years, seek to increase their virility by crossing them with the flocks of their neighbours. There is no real change of breed; merely that increase of vitality which comes from a change of the same blood. The fact, then, that interbreeding between men of European blood causes no deterioration, or is of marked benefit, has no necessary bearing whatever on the question as to what will result from the crossing of widely severed human varieties; varieties so distinct that to find the progenital link between them we might have to travel up the lines of human life till we reached those early forms in which articulate speech was only in process of development, differences which are to-day, even in the fœtal condition, unmistakably distinct. We have dwelt at this considerable length on this matter because it is well we should attempt to look impartially on both sides of a question of so vital import to the inhabitants of Africa, both in the present and in the future. And it must be borne in mind that even among animals not all the crossed descendants of widely separated varieties show this tendency to revert to the primitive type, but merely that there is a general tending for them to do so, and that there may be in any given case other conditions which would entirely defeat the working of the law.[36]