ispensable to the discussion. The general
conclusions reached by the use of these concepts of selective
adaptation would remain substantially true if the earlier, Darwinian
and Spencerian, terms and concepts were substituted. Under the
circumstances, some latitude may be admissible in the use of terms. The
word "type" is used loosely, to denote variations of temperament which
the ethnologists would perhaps recognize only as trivial variants of
the type rather than as distinct ethnic types. Wherever a closer
discrimination seems essential to the argument, the effort to make such
a closer discrimination will be evident from the context.

The ethnic types of today, then, are variants of the primitive racial
types. They have suffered some alteration, and have attained some degree
of fixity in their altered form, under the discipline of the barbarian
culture. The man of the hereditary present is the barbarian variant,
servile or aristocratic, of the ethnic elements that constitute him.
But this barbarian variant has not attained the highest degree of
homogeneity or of stability. The barbarian culture--the predatory and
quasi-peaceable cultural stages--though of great absolute duration, has
been neither protracted enough nor invariable enough in character to
give an extreme fixity of type. Variations from the barbarian human
nature occur with some frequency, and these cases of variation are
becoming more noticeable today, because the conditions of modern life no
longer act consistently to repress departures from the barbarian normal.
The predatory temperament does not lead itself to all the purposes of
modern life, and more especially not to modern industry.

Departures from the human nature of the hereditary present are most
frequently of the nature of reversions to an earlier variant of the
type. This earlier variant is represented by the temperament
which characterizes the primitive phase of peaceable savagery. The
circumstances of life and the ends of effort that prevailed before the
advent of the barbarian culture, shaped human nature and fixed it as
regards certain fundamental traits. And it is to these ancient, generic
features that modern men are prone to take back in case of variation
from the human nature of the hereditary present. The conditions under
which men lived in the most primitive stages of associated life that can
properly be called human, seem to have been of a peaceful kind; and the
character--the tempe