d so often, and has broken down so very often, that in no case,
probably, do any great number of careful inquirers very firmly believe
it. They may accept it provisionally, as the best hypothesis at
present, but they feel about it as they cannot help feeling as to an
army which has always been beaten; however strong it seems, they think
it will be beaten again. What the other explanation is exactly I cannot
pretend to say. Possibly as yet the data for a confident opinion are
not before us. But by far the most plausible suggestion is that of Mr.
Wallace, that these race-marks are living records of a time when the
intellect of man was not as able as it is now to adapt his life and
habits to change of region; that consequently early mortality in the
first wanderers was beyond conception great; that only those (so to
say) haphazard individuals throve who were born with a protected
nature--that is, a nature suited to the climate and the country, fitted
to use its advantages, shielded from its natural diseases. According to
Mr. Wallace, the Negro is the remnant of the one variety of man who
without more adaptiveness than then existed could live in Interior
Africa. Immigrants died off till they produced him or something like
him, and so of the Esquimaux or the American.

Any protective habit also struck out in such a time would have a far
greater effect than it could afterwards. A gregarious tribe, whose
leader was in some imitable respects adapted to the struggle for life,
and which copied its leader, would have an enormous advantage in the
struggle for life. It would be sure to win and live, for it would be
coherent and adapted, whereas, in comparison, competing tribes would be
incoherent and unadapted. And I suppose that in early times, when those
bodies did not already contain the records and the traces of endless
generations, any new habit would more easily fix its mark on the
heritable element, and would be transmitted more easily and more
certainly. In such an age, man being softer and more pliable, deeper
race-marks would be more easily inscribed and would be more likely to
continue legible.

But I have no pretence to speak on such matters; this paper, as I have
so often explained, deals with nation-making and not with race-making.
I assume a world of marked varieties of man, and only want to show how
less marked contrasts would probably and naturally arise in each. Given
large homogeneous populations, some Negro, som