to one country?  If, on the other hand, we look farther afield, and study the results of race-mixture or “miscegenation,” we but encounter fresh puzzles.  That the half-breed is an unsatisfactory person may be true; and yet, until the conditions of his upbringing are somehow discounted, the race problem remains exactly where it was.  Or, again, it may be true that miscegenation increases human fertility, as some hold; but, until it is shown that the increase of fertility does not merely result in flooding the world with inferior types, we are no nearer to a solution.

If, then, there is a practical moral to this chapter, it is merely this:  to encourage anthropologists to press forward with their study of race; and in the meantime to do nothing rash.

CHAPTER IV ENVIRONMENT

When a child is born it has been subjected for some three-quarters of a year already to the influences of environment.  Its race, indeed, was fixed once for all at the moment of conception.  Yet that superadded measure of plasticity, which has to be treated as something apart from the racial factor, enables it to respond for good or for evil to the pre-natal—­that is to say, maternal—­environment.  Thus we may easily fall into the mistake of supposing our race to be degenerate, when poor feeding and exposure to unhealthy surroundings on the part of the mothers are really responsible for the crop of weaklings that we deplore.  And, in so far as it turns out to be so, social reformers ought to heave a sigh of relief.  Why?  Because to improve the race by way of eugenics, though doubtless feasible within limits, remains an unrealized possibility through our want of knowledge.  On the other hand, to improve the physical environment is fairly straight-ahead work, once we can awake the public conscience to the need of undertaking this task for the benefit of all classes of the community alike.  If civilized man wishes to boast of being clearly superior to the rest of his kind, it must be mainly in respect to his control over the physical environment.  Whatever may have been the case in the past, it seems as true now-a-days to say that man makes his physical environment as that his physical environment makes him.

Even if this be granted, however, it remains the fact that our material circumstances in the widest sense of the term play a very decisive part in the shaping of our lives.  Hence the importance of geographical studies as they bear on the subject of man.  From the moment that a child is conceived, it is subjected to what it is now the fashion to call a “geographic control.”  Take the case of the child of English parents born in India.  Clearly several factors will conspire to determine whether it lives or dies.  For simplicity’s sake let us treat them as three.  First of all, there is the fact that the child belongs to a particular cultural group; in other words, that it has been born with a piece