lanter is apt to return from a long sojourn in the East with his skin
charged with a dark pigment which no amount of Pears' soap will remove
during the rest of his life. It would be interesting to conduct
experiments, on the lines of those of Professor Boas already mentioned,
with the object of discovering in what degree the same capacity for
amassing protective pigment declares itself in children of European
parentage born in the tropics or transplanted thither during infancy.
Correspondingly, the tendency of dark stocks to bleach in cold
countries needs to be studied. In the background, too, lurks the
question whether such effects of individual plasticity can be
transmitted to offspring, and become part of the inheritance.

One more remark upon the subject of colour. Now-a-days civilized
peoples, as well as many of the ruder races that the former govern,
wear clothes. In other words they have dodged the sun, by developing,
with the aid of mind, a complex society that includes the makers of
white drill suits and solar helmets. But, under such conditions, the
colour of one's skin becomes more or less of a luxury. Protective
pigment, at any rate now-a-days, counts for little as compared with
capacity for social service. Colour, in short, is rapidly losing its
vital function. Will it therefore tend to disappear? In the long run,
it would seem--perhaps only in the very long run--it will become
dissociated from that general fitness to survive under particular
climatic conditions of which it was once the innate mark. Be this as
it may, race-prejudice, that is so largely founded on sheer
considerations of colour, is bound to decay, if and when the races
of darker colour succeed in displaying, on the average, such qualities
of mind as will enable them to compete with the whites on equal terms,
in a world which is coming more and more to include all climates.

* * * * *

Thus we are led on to discuss race in its mental aspect. Here, more
than ever, we are all at sea, for want of a proper criterion. What
is to be the test of mind? Indeed, mind and plasticity are almost the
same thing. Race, therefore, as being the stiffening in the evolution
of life, might seem by its very nature opposed to mind as a limiting
or obstructing force. Are we, then, going to return to the old
pre-scientific notion of soul as something alien to body, and thereby
simply clogged, thwarted and dragged down? That would nev