How, then, do originality, diversity, individuality, genius, begin to come in?  In this way, as it seems to me, looking at the matter both a priori and by the light of actual experience.

Suppose a country inhabited in its interior by a savage race of hunters and fighters, and on its seaboard by an equally savage race of pirates and fishermen, like the Dyaks of Borneo.  Each of these races, if left to itself, will develop in time its own peculiar and special type of savage cleverness.  Each (in the scientific slang of the day) will adapt itself to its particular environment.  The people of the interior will acquire and inherit a wonderful facility in spearing monkeys and knocking down parrots; while the people of the sea-coast will become skilful managers of canoes upon the water, and merciless plunderers of one another’s villages, after the universal fashion of all pirates.  These original differences of position and function will necessarily entail a thousand minor differences of intelligence and skill in a thousand different ways.  For example, the sea-coast people, having of pure need to make themselves canoes and paddles, will probably learn to decorate their handicraft with ornamental patterns; and the aesthetic taste thus aroused will, no doubt, finally lead them to adorn the facades of their wooden huts with the grinning skulls of slaughtered enemies, prettily disposed at measured distances.  A thoughtless world may laugh, indeed, at these naive expressions of the nascent artistic and decorative faculties in the savage breast, but the aesthetic philosopher knows how to appreciate them at their true worth, and to see in them the earliest ingenuous precursors of our own Salisbury, Lichfield, and Westminster.

Now, so long as these two imaginary races of ours continue to remain distinct and separate, it is not likely that idiosyncrasies or varieties to any great extent will arise among them.  But, as soon as you permit intermarriage to take place, the inherited and developed qualities of the one race will be liable to crop up in the next generation, diversely intermixed in every variety of degree with the inherited and developed qualities of the other.  The children may take after either parent in any combination of qualities whatsoever.  You have admitted an apparently capricious element of individuality:  a power on the part of the half-breeds of differing from one another to an extent quite impossible in the two original homogeneous societies.  In one word, you have made possible the future existence of diversity in character.

If, now, we turn from these perfectly simple savage communities to our own very complex and heterogeneous world, what do we find?  An endless variety of soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, and jolly undertakers, most of whom fall into a certain rough number of classes, each with its own developed and inherited traits and peculiarities.  Our world is made up, like the world of ancient Egypt and of modern India, of an immense variety of separate castes—­not, indeed, rigidly demarcated and strictly limited as in those extremely hierarchical societies, but still very fairly hereditary in character, and given on the average to a tolerably close system of intermarriage within the caste.