ch punishes with
extinction all those types that fail in fitness for survival in the
struggle for existence, so that, unlike the animals that die out when
their particular structure does not fit in with their environment, man
by means of his thinking brain was able to equip himself with parts of
his environment, and thus to become its master. The process of evolution
ceased to affect directly this creature who had a brain that could
think, and ever since that brain was given to him man has remained
unmoved and stationary above and apart from all other living things. All
this is implied in the command, "Be ye fruitful and multiply and
replenish the earth and subdue it."

But though man became almost emancipated from the direct servitude of
natural selection, he still is, and always will be, subject to the law
of heredity. Man is made up of a group of innate characters inherited
from a very mixed ancestry, these characters, being innate, are
transmissible to his offspring, but such characters as are acquired by
the parent through the direct influence of education or other
environment, not being innate are not transmissible to his children. But
in so far as a new development of latent and innate characters, through
the influence of the environment, may help or hinder certain types in
propagating themselves, the race may, perhaps, be modified through such
influence by the process of gradual elimination of the types that lack
the characters that prove to be of survival value in a particular
locality. This we may suppose might happen where a number of Europeans,
composed half of blondes and half of brunettes, come to live in a
tropical country, if it be proved that the comparative darkness of the
brunettes afford them better protection against inimical light and heat
than the fair skin of the blondes, so that the former would on the
average, enjoy better health and live longer, and therefore have more
children than the latter, whereby, in course of time, the appearance of
these people would be modified in respect of the general complexion of
their skin. This, it is easy to see, would not mean the acquisition of a
new and heritable means of protection, but only a development in each
individual of an already present innate character that happened to be
well fitted for survival in a certain climatic zone.

In order, therefore, to obtain any direct modification of the race in
the way of mental improvement the physical effect of