Yes, but remember that you are judging by the gross impression, not by the element of race or breed as distinguished from the rest.  Here, you say, come a couple of our American cousins.  Perhaps it is their speech that betrayeth them; or perhaps it is the general cut of their jib.  If you were to go into their actual pedigrees, you would find that the one had a Scotch father and a mother from out of Dorset; whilst the other was partly Scandinavian and partly Spanish with a tincture of Jew.  Yet to all intents and purposes they form one type.  And, the more deeply you go into it, the more mixed we all of us turn out to be, when breed, and breed alone, is the subject of inquiry.  Yet race, in the only sense that the word has for an anthropologist, means inherited breed, and nothing more or less—­inherited breed, and all that it covers, whether bodily or mental features.

For race, let it not be forgotten, presumably extends to mind as well as to body.  It is not merely skin-deep.  Contrast the stoical Red Indian with the vivacious Negro; or the phlegmatic Dutchman with the passionate Italian.  True, you say, but what about the influence of their various climates, or again of their different ideals of behaviour?  Quite so.  It is immensely difficult to separate the effects of the various factors.  Yet surely the race-factor counts for something in the mental constitution.  Any breeder of horses will tell you that neither the climate of Newmarket, nor careful training, nor any quantity of oats, nor anything else, will put racing mettle into cart-horse stock.

In what follows, then, I shall try to show just what the problem about the race-factor is, even if I have to trespass a little way into general biology in order to do so.[2] And I shall not attempt to conceal the difficulties relating to the race-problem.  I know that the ordinary reader is supposed to prefer that all the thinking should be done beforehand, and merely the results submitted to him.  But I cannot believe that he would find it edifying to look at half-a-dozen books upon the races of mankind, and find half-a-dozen accounts of their relationships, having scarcely a single statement in common.  Far better face the fact that race still baffles us almost completely.  Yet, breed is there; and, in its own time and in its own way, breed will out.

[Footnote 2:  The reader is advised to consult also the more comprehensive study on Evolution by Professors Geddes and Thomson in this series.]

Race or breed was a moment ago described as a factor in human nature.  But to break up human nature into factors is something that we can do, or try to do, in thought only.  In practice we can never succeed in doing anything of the kind.  A machine such as a watch we can take to bits and then put together again.  Even a chemical compound such as water we can resolve into oxygen and hydrogen and then reproduce out of its elements.  But to dissect a living thing