tion
of a human variety or race is that mankind shows a tendency to
segregate in groups, like with like. To a large extent this is true
also of animals, but in man it acquires a special dominance, owing to
the greater activity in him of psychical or mental influences in all
his proceedings. The "cagots" of mid-France are the descendants of
former leper families. They remain separated from the rest of the
population, and do not now know why, nor do their hostile neighbours.
Such "outcast" or "accursed" tribes and family groups are found also
in Great Britain, and throughout the world. Possibly the "pygmies" owe
their preservation to this tendency. Virchow regarded the Lapps as a
race produced by disease--a pathological product. It is possible that
former liability to disease and present immunity from it is the final
explanation of the tropical pygmy race. In the United States black
pigs are able to eat, without harm, a common marsh herb, the
"Red-root" _Lachnanthes tinctoria_, which kills other pigs. Hence a
black race is established, not because it is black, but because, in
it, blackness is "the outward and visible sign of an inward and
chemical grace"--that is to say, of a physiological or chemical power
of resistance to, and immunity from, the poison of an otherwise
nutritious plant. Such "correlations" were described by Darwin, and
are of extreme importance and interest--far more so than is, at
present, recognised by naturalists. I am inclined to the supposition
that the obvious outward signs, the round head, bombous forehead,
furry skin, and diminutive size of the pygmies are the outcome of an
inward physiological condition peculiar to them, which has enabled
them to resist disease or to eat certain kinds of food, or possibly to
develop great mental acuteness, and so has led to the establishment of
these peculiar small people as a race, without their smallness itself
having anything to do with their selection and preservation. In that
case smallness would be a "by-product," a "correlated" character, not
the "effective life-saving" character.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: "Science from an Easy Chair," Methuen, 1909.]

CHAPTER XVI

PREHISTORIC PETTICOATS

After the last great extension of glaciers in Europe, during which
nearly all of Great Britain and the North of France and Germany were
buried with Scandinavia under one great ice-sheet--and when this
ice-sheet had receded, and the climate was like that of