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 of paper in its mouth rep