ARTICLE V.-THE SURVIVAL OF THE FILTHIEST.

IN some alleged sciences, two absolutely dissentient theories of especial prominence are held by various disciples, believers, speculators, concerning the origin of man, that is of the genus homo as at present existing. These two rival doctrines may be briefly stated to be the theory of deterioration or fall, and the theory of development. The former is to the effect that men have descended in both senses from demi-gods, sons of God, the perfect man made in the image of God. The latter, to the effect that man has developed from and through a series of earlier and less complex or perfect forms. of living, is probably held by most special scientists: at least the enthusiasm with which the "ungodliness and spiritual pride" of science is mentioned in some highly respected places would indicate a claim, or a concession, that the majority of alleged specialists hold the latter doctrine.

From the heat with which the discussions on this topic have been waged, as well as from the apparent irreconcilability of the two theories, is exhibited the hopelessness of an attempt to dull the edge of antipathy with which one of these doctrines is attacked by the partisans of the other.

For the purposes of this paper certainly it will be assumed that there is a "last ditch" in the fortifications of each of the belligerents, and as either theory is of equal utility to the conclusions herein attempted, the belligerents and their belligerency are mentioned in the main for the purpose of giving an a fortiori conclusion to any evidence taken from them. For if, after all the antagonism of the chosen polemic exponents of two so adverse schools, in which almost every scholar on either side has taken part, there remains any single truth acknowledged or generally conceded, that truth must be readily admitted to be a well established one; and a postulate of either faction which at this date remains postulated, must be honored with the recognition of an exceedingly respectable, fit, and surviving postulate.

But if out of the belligerency could be extracted an element of peace, one color of the rainbow (or spectrum) of reconciliation, what rose color should tinge that element !

By good fortune there is an element of agreement. Both sides believe in change (one for the better indeed, the other for the worse), and a change from belligerency is a change to peace. There had been changes before man. Neither Darwin nor the Pope dispute that proposition. Proceeding on safe ground, and using impartially, so far as practicable, the terminology of either side, let us say that, when man appeared, he appeared in a garden, in a fertile or alluvial spot, that it became known to him that tillage was desirable, that there was fruit for him to eat and water by him, of the river of life-or of living water. Let us say that prior to his time there had been notable changes, before which there had been no garden, perhaps no water, no desirable drinking or swimming water, not for men: that the waters had covered the face of the earth, that the earth was without form and void; or that there was a chaos, a nebula perhaps, and mephitic gases, and oolitic bedfellows, and jurassic horrors, and no fruit, and bad weather, such weather and company as a shark or a snake could not live in; nor an Icthyosauros Acadianus, which is Latin and Greek for a compromise between a snake and a shark. The name was originally a compromise of quite a spirited difference of opinion between Agassiz and Marsh. It will be conceded that there was a time when it was not fit for man to be out. To one inured to the balmy ways of a New England May the concession will be easy. It will even seem that the time was not quite so remote as some very wise men have claimed, and Moses' weather record might not seem incredible to Vennor.

It will be conceded that the garden or fertile spot could be improved or kept fertile only by tillage; that tillage was requisite to the maintenance and increase of the favorable conditions by which early and later man was surrounded. Perhaps it is not too much to assume that fertile or alluvial land is commonest not on bleak mountain tops or frigid slopes, but in river valleys and low lying plains, and that its condition must considerably depend on what washes down from more elevated places.

Given, then, for a starting point in anthropology, a man in a garden, and granted the desirability of tillage, cannot all the belligerents be expected to concede that much may depend on the manner of the tilling, that whether scientifically or piously, agriculture has been given a prime place in the economy of man's nature and mission, and that what he is to be, will depend very much on what sort of tillage he devotes himself to.

And as man is an "end unto himself" according to the philosopher, or "his chief end is to glorify God” according to the catechism (and which is very much the same thing according to St. Paul, who says "Ye are the temple of God"), it may not be presuming to assume that the development of the man is to be a more important result of the tillage, than the development of the garden; and in so much as the crop is to feed the gardener and clothe him (subject always to the enlarged sense in which the house builder and the artist exchange their commodities for his crop), it can be fairly taken for a surviving postulate that man is himself the main object, final cause, or ratio essendi of the tillage; and that this is so, not merely in the narrower sense of the exercise suiting him or the dignity of labor or the hunt being more attractive than the game, but in the directer and larger sense that man.is himself the chief crop.

How long ought to stand the reply of the old farmer among the granite boulders of his unfruitful acres? "What can we

raise here? We raise men." It has been the boast of more than one century in many a barren tract in the eastern and middle states, not to be forgotten while the memory of war lasts or the presage of triumph in peace or war is possible, not to be forgotten in however base an estimate of commonwealth or confusion of material prosperity, "We raise men."

The early conditions in which tillage was enjoined are not to be ignored if we are not to be unjust to the Mosaic school. Nothing had occurred at the date of the injunction which had suggested clothing. The trees of the garden furnished all the edibles required, also the costumes of the day as soon as any came in use. The object of the tillage, for all record evidence to the contrary, was wholly subjective,-wholly for the sake of the man and his development. In view of the Winter

Nelis pear and the Tyson, it will not do to say wholly for the sake of the original man, but for his sake and that of his successor, who was to eat the Winter Nelis and the Tyson, and for the sake of the later Eves who, having eaten the Fameuse, would wonder at a woman's having been tempted by a primæval apple. Whether then by reason of his being his own producer, middle man, and consumer, unplagued by strikes or questions whether honest socialistic principle could keep him favorable to a division of capital after a week's wages had gone to bank deposit, or by reason of the dignity of his employment, or otherwise, man was to be and is the chief crop; though as the great means to the end of surviving and developing manhood, and the home of the generations to come, the soil is itself sacred. Each owes certain duties to the land, to the Winter Nelis and the Fameuse of the future; or as one may say "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." Henry George does not deny that, he confirms. He thinks the garden so important that the general government ought to assume the care of it. Judging from the success with which Uncle Sam has managed his farm, especially the timber, there would be a difference of opinion about that.

It is the object of this paper to exhibit how directly proper or improper tillage affects the well being of man, not alone through the quality of the supplies he is to consume in one generation or another, but in its immediate effect in other ways upon the bodily and mental characteristics of the race.

A progressive woman has asserted that men are what their wives make them. Another has insisted that they are what their mothers make them. Emerson regarded them the result of ancestral traits. A great physician boasted of the enduring livers and stomachs of a family as the gift of his calomel. Draper had no doubt that men are what the weather makes them; and so far have we seen this to be true that it is certain even the existence of man is possible only within closely defined conditions of climate. Of course it is quite equally certain that man is greatly modified and limited in development by a narrower range of climatic conditions than that within which his existence is merely possible.

Daniel Wilson, commenting on the physical characteristics

of the native tribes of Canada,* after comparing the art in ivory carving of the Tarratins on Fraser river, and that of the Haidas and Eskimos, contrasts the finely developed skulls of the Cro-Magnon cave men with the Eskimo skull to the latter's serious disadvantage, and finds Malte Brunn, Robertson, Humboldt, Morton, Meigs, Gliddon, and Agassiz all concurring "in excepting from the assumed American race peculiar to this continent the Polar tribe or Eskimos," and through. out the discussion of the question by each of these authorities, runs the common assumption that climate and conditions of life affect the permanent ethnological and physical develop. ment even to the shape of the skull, and that this development may certainly be downward as well as upward.

Latham says of the Eskimo, "physically he is a Mongol or Asiatic, philologically he is an American, at least in respect to the principles on which his speech is constructed." But with the verdict not proven as to the origin of the Eskimo, Wilson adds (Ibid., p. 554), "to the geologist who fully realizes all that is implied in the slow retreat of the paleolithic race of the valley of the Véserè, over submerged continents since engulfed in the Atlantic, and through changing glacial and subglacial ages to their latest home on the verge of the pole, the time may suffice for any amount of change in the physical characteristics of the race." This is perhaps the extreme case in change of racial qualities by gradual acclimatization, the possibility not being contemplated of the survival of a race at once changing from one set of conditions to its opposite. In his last letter from Palestine, recommending the submergence of the entire valley of the Jordan to create an inland sea whereon the navies of England might check the advance of Russia to seaboard and commerce, Chinese Gordon, a few months before his death, illustrated his sublime devotion to the development of white Christianity, by the concession, "these are fertile lands, but white men cannot live on them."

Professor Virchow, the eminent pathologist of Strasburg, at a recent congress of German naturalists and physicians, recognizing changes of climate as essential to pathological inquiry, * Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Montreal, August, 1882, p. 549.