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personal observation and inquiry, appeared in articles con- tributed to the Bzblioth’eyce Universelle of Geneva, in
which, inter alia, he anticipated by nearly 40 years the
Unionist policy towards Ireland. His skill, his energy, hiscommand of men, were shown in the statecraft which made
France and Great Britain his auxiliaries in the expulsionof Austria from Lombardy, thus setting the revolutionaryball rolling which GARIBALDI urged on to the liberation ofthe Two Sicilies and their absorption ‘. into the Italian
kingdom-matters which are, in the day now passing,familiar to the world in the vivid narrative of Mr. GEORGE
MACAULAY TREVELYAN.
Having achieved his country’s independence, he revertedto the nature-study and the biological sciences which hadfascinated his youth, and, among many strokes of academic
policy, he may be credited with the revival of physiologicalteaching in Italy by bringing the distinguished Dutch chemistand biologist JACOB MOLESCHOTT to Turin, a step whichhas re-invigorated the study in every Italian medical school,where more than one of the professors have been MOLE-SCHOTT’S pupils. Indeed, there is no calculating the goodhe might have wrought in Italy had not "his sun
gone down while it was yet day." After his death
his repositories were found to be full of designs for developingthe agricultural resources of the mainland and the islands,one of these being a plan for converting Sicily into a greattobacco-growing plantation. His work, as his compatriotssadly admit, was but half done when he died at Turin inhis fifty-first year, a martyr to over-exertion and high-pressure activity, intellectual and moral-a work which hehimself acknowledged to be so far short of completion that
(in the famous speech of his friend and fellow statesman,MASSIMO D’AZEGLIO), "having made Italy, he had yet tomake Italians."
The Future of the Negro Race.ANTHROPOLOGISTS are naturally recruited from the ranks
of medical men ; a study of human anatomy, physiology,and psychology must always form the basal part of the
education of those who make a comparative study of humanraces. In the many wordy warfares which have been wagedround the status of the negro race medical men have taken an
active part. It was SHARP, a London surgeon, who elicitedthe famous verdict from Lord Chief Justice MANSFIELD in
1772, that a slave was free when he stepped on British soil. Thecrusade for the abolition of slavery, which was commencedthen and prolonged far into the nineteenth century, directedthe attention of medical men to the racial position of the
negro. Was he structurally a different species and thereforeunfit for an equal place with the European ? At the end of
the eighteenth century no man was so well qualified as JOHNHUNTER to answer the first part of the question. He answersit, but in an indirect manner. When REYNOLDS painted his
portrait HUNTER opened the sketch book shown in the
background of that famous picture at the page which illus-trates the evolution of the human skull. The negro skull
is figured as an intermediate stage; in HUNTER’S opinionthe negro cranium was a lower stage than the European."The darkest species," he wrote, "should be reckoned
nearest the original." HUNTER regarded fertility as a
test of species ; the mulatto was well known to him, and it istherefore clear that he regarded the African and European asone species. A contemporary of HUNTER, CHARLES WHITE,the Manchester physician, also regarded the negro as a stagein the evolution of the human race ; he was the first to show
that the forearm of the negro, like that of the chimpanzee,was proportionately very long. JAMES COWLES PRICHARD,the Bristol physician, the first and one of the greatest ofBritish anthropologists, gave an analysis of the negrocharacters and concluded that there were no grounds forexcluding the negro from the species in which the Europeanis included. In his famous lectures on the Natural Historyof Man at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in
1818, Sir WILLIAM LAWRENCE, while admitting the specificequality of the negro, said that " every fact in the pasthistory and present condition of the African proves their
inferiority of faculties," but added that such inferiority con.stituted a reason for special treatment of the race and didnot justify the " revolting and antichristian " traffic in
human flesh.
We may pass lightly over the change of view
which followed the advent of Darwinism-the work of
HUXLEY and of FLOWER, both by training medical men-and see how the matter stands to-day. The authority weare to quote is not a medical man, but one closely in touchand sympathy with the work and aspirations of modern
medicine, Sir HARRY H. JOHNSTON. No one is better qualifiedto speak of the African races than he. For 25 years he has
been exploring, investigating, recording, administering, and
governing various parts of tropical Africa. The latest work,"The Negro in the New World," is the twelfth of a
series of great works devoted to a study of the negro’smind culture and body. In the first chapter of his latest
work he gives a brief but admirable summary of the struc.
tural position of the negro. There is no question of a
higher and lower race ; the negro represents not a stage in
the evolution of those human races which are usuallyaccounted higher ; the European, the Asiatic, the African
represent terminal branches of the human stock ; each has
its own specialisations. If pigmentation of the negro is anold character of the primal human stock, his woolly hair andfull lips are novel specialisations the features of his skull-his straight and rather bulging forehead, the usual absenceof supraorbital ridges-are less primitive than those of the
European ; he is prognathous because he has a healthilydeveloped dentition and palate. The negro brain carries on
it no mark by which it can be recognised with certainty,but we must at the same time admit that we cannot assigna mental status to any man from a mere examination
of the brain. We must judge a race, not by the appear-ance of the brain after death, but by the manner in
which that organ reacts to the demands of civilisation.
Sir HARRY JOHNSTON’S study of the racial problems of
the United States leads him to anticipate a successful futurefor the negro there. He is not blind to the defects and
1 The Negro in the New World By Sir Harry H. Johnston,G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.Sc., with one illustration in colour by the author,and 390 black and white illustrations by the author and others. Maps byMr. J. W. Addison (Royal Geographical Society). London: Methuenand Co., Limited. 1910. Pp. 499.
499
delinquencies of the African races ; in his opinion the
negro is the victim of his past ; his faults are the result of
long ages spent in the darkness of the African continent andunder the lash and discipline of the slave master. In Sir
HARRY JOHNSTON’S opinion education will raise the negro
to take a just place in the scheme of civilisation. He pinshis faith to that type of practical educational propagandawhich is being directed by Dr. BOOKER WASHINGTON fromthe Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. If all the members of
the coloured race could be raised by education to the
level of Dr. BOOKER WASHINGTON, then the negro problemwould indeed be solved-all but for one obstacle. Many ofour readers will remember the storm of indignation that wasroused in the United States when President ROOSEVELT
received Dr. BOOKER WASHINGTON and sat down to table
with him. This, in Sir HARRY JOHNSTON’S opinion, was amanifestation of race pre,judice-. nonsense which has gotto be uprooted if the United States is logically to extend itsbeneficent governing influence beyond its actual geographicalfrontiers." Thus, in Sir HARRY JOHNSTON’S opinion,the solution of what is known as the "negro problem" "
is the eradication from the white man’s mind of "race
prejudice." He wishes to see the American receive the
African in his midst " as a brother, but not as a brother-in-law." He pictures a future when the descendants of the
10,000,000 negroes and negroids now in the States will live
harmoniously side by side with the whites and share equallyall the privileges of the predominant race.
This view of a terribly important situation will not findfavour in the United States, even, we think, among
philosophers, and in our opinion Sir HARRY JOHNSTON
under-estimates the strength and the nature of that
remarkable trait of the Anglo-Saxon which he regardsas race prejudice. The trait is one which ROBERT KNOX,the Edinburgh anatomist, recognised nearly a century agoas the predominating feature of the Anglo-Saxon. Politicians
and anthropologists cannot blink its strength. Our home
circumstances leave this quality latent, but we see that it
quickly becomes alive when the Saxon passes oversea. Under
its influence we see the Australians legislate to secure pre-dominance and purity of race ; we see, whether we agreeor not, the new federation of South Africa leaves the
native races outside the pale of its franchise ; we see
the Southern States elbow the coloured population quietlybut effectively from the ballot-boxes, and the Northern
States, which went to war for negro freedom, look coldlyon. A survey of the history of colonisation shows that
the Portuguese and Spaniards had a less degree of ’’ race
prejudice," with the result that their virile blood in the
course of generations became lost in the veins of native
races. Race prejudice, or race instinct as we prefer to callit, has preserved the Saxon blood amongst alien races ; its
very strength now makes the problem of our modern
civilisation more difficult ; there must be a constant warbetween the Saxon sense of justice and the Saxon sense ofrace purity. Hence it is that the prejudice becomes thedominant feeling in those living side by side with alienraces ; the sense of justice is dominant in those at a distance.We may not like the fact, but we cannot solve our difficulties
by overlooking it. Those who have searched into the factors
which have dominated the dispersion and differentiation ofthe human stock into the various forms we see to-day on theearth find in this irrational race-feeling a main driving force.The race survives as a race in so far as this instinct is
implanted in it. Race instinct is as old as the human
stock itself ; it is not a late or petty mental acquisition thatcan be brushed lightly off or eradicated by education. It is
a basal trait which anthropologists and politicians cannotafford to leave out of their calculations.
Annotations.
NATURE AND NURTURE.
"Ne quid nimis."
Professor Karl Pearson recently said-or said somethingvery like it-that education and environment play onlya small part in the formation of the individual. He spokeas president at a debate of an extremely polemical kind,held at University College, London, and this deliveranceseemed to be directed to a doctrinaire gallery. But nowthat we have read his truly luminous pamphlet entitled"Nature and Nurture" we breathe freely, for in its
pages he "makes good," as George Borrow would have
said, an otherwise dubious utterance. "Nature and
Nurture, the Problem of the Future" is the outcomeof researches conducted at the Galton Laboratory forNational Eugenics in University College, Gower-street,by Professor Pearson and his accomplished staff. "I I
believe," says Professor Pearson, speaking of the fact thatour popular politics are mainly the result of sentimental
generalisations and doctrinaire assertions, " that the day foracting merely on a consensus of opinion based on rhetoricalor emotional appeal of a political or philanthropic characteris passing by." This is our own belief also. In future states-
men and reformers will more and more base their views on
careful inductions derived from scientific data, laboriouslyacquired and registered. The more data the better. Theaim of the Galton Laboratory is to multiply them till theirmere weight must necessarily convince the candid and thescientific-minded. "Nature and Nurture," which has
already been a good deal discussed, deals with the old
question as to the relative influence upon the individual
of heredity and environment. There is a school whichbelieves and declares that in three generations the descend-ants of any sort of parents can be made into anything-into persons of the highest culture or the most approvedconventionality. These pseudo-thinkers forget in liminethat inherited ill-health or disease, which has much to
do with individuality, cannot be eliminated at will.
"Dissipants," as the Americans now call them, will givebirth to a progeny of vicious tendencies ; insanity dies veryhard, if it does not increase. Such a serious condition asdeaf-mutism may become intensified. Cataract and epilepsyin some forms progress cumulatively. Nothing could be moreluridly instructive than the pedigrees published in ProfessorPearson’s book. One such shows how a single blind manoriginated in four generations 15 blind descendants. In
another-we purposely do not quote the extreme cases-wenote "twenty abnormals in four generations, the product oftwo degenerates whose right to reproduce their kind shouldhave been challenged by man from the start, as it would
have been refused a priori by Nature." It is the business of
the biometrician to attempt to establish laws with regard tothese matters, or at any rate to supply matter for intelligentanticipation. Nature, of course, is, in the opinion of some, the