was reviewed by M. Quatrefages in an elaborate report
upon the occasion of the French Exhibition, of all things in the world.
M. Quatrefages quotes from another writer the phrase that South America
is a great laboratory of experiments in the mixture of races, and
reviews the different results which different cases have shown. In
South Carolina the Mulatto race is not very prolific, whereas in
Louisiana and Florida it decidedly is so. In Jamaica and in Java the
Mulatto cannot reproduce itself after the third generation; but on the
continent of America, as everybody knows, the mixed race is now most
numerous, and spreads generation after generation without impediment.
Equally various likewise in various cases has been the fate of the
mixed race between the white man and the native American; sometimes it
prospers, sometimes it fails. And M. Quatrefages concludes his
description thus: 'En acceptant comme vraies toutes les observations
qui tendent a faire admettre qu'il en sera autrement dans les localites
dont j'ai parle plus haut, quelle est la conclusion a tirer de faits
aussi peu semblables? Evidemment, on est oblige de reconnaitre que le
developpement de la race mulatre est favorise, retarde, ou empeche par
des circonstances locales; en d'autres termes, qu'il depend des
influences exercees par l'ensemble des conditions d'existence, par le
MILIEU.' By which I understand him to mean that the mixture of race
sometimes brings out a form of character better suited than either
parent form to the place and time; that in such cases, by a kind of
natural selection, it dominates over both parents, and perhaps
supplants both, whereas in other cases the mixed race is not as good
then and there as other parent forms, and then it passes away soon and
of itself.

Early in history the continual mixtures by conquest were just so many
experiments in mixing races as are going on in South America now. New
races wandered into new districts, and half killed, half mixed with the
old races. And the result was doubtless as various and as difficult to
account for then as now; sometimes the crossing answered, sometimes it
failed. But when the mixture was at its best, it must have excelled
both parents in that of which so much has been said; that is,
variability, and consequently progressiveness. There is more life in
mixed nations. France, for instance, is justly said to be the mean term
between the Latin and the German races. A Norman, as you m