al as a monkey. The living world does not consist of a
repetition of similar elements, but of an endless variety of them,
that have grown, body and soul, through selective influences into
close adaptation to their contemporaries, and to the physical
circumstances of the localities they inhabit. The moral and
intellectual wealth of a nation largely consists in the multifarious
variety of the gifts of the men who compose it, and it would be the
very reverse of improvement to make all its members assimilate to a
common type. However, in every race of domesticated animals, and
especially in the rapidly-changing race of man, there are elements,
some ancestral and others the result of degeneration, that are of
little or no value, or are positively harmful. We may, of course, be
mistaken about some few of these, and shall find in our fuller
knowledge that they subserve the public good in some indirect manner;
but, notwithstanding this possibility, we are justified in roundly
asserting that the natural characteristics of every human race admit
of large improvement in many directions easy to specify.

I do not, however, offer a list of these, but shall confine myself
to directing attention to a very few hereditary characteristics of a
marked kind, some of which are most desirable and others greatly the
reverse; I shall also describe new methods of appraising and
defining them. Later on in the book I shall endeavour to define the
place and duty of man in the furtherance of the great scheme of
evolution, and I shall show that he has already not only adapted
circumstance to race, but also, in some degree and often
unconsciously, race to circumstance; and that his unused powers in
the latter direction are more considerable than might have been
thought.

It is with the innate moral and intellectual faculties that the book
is chiefly concerned, but they are so closely bound up with the
physical ones that these must be considered as well. It is, moreover,
convenient to take them the first, so I will begin with the features.

FEATURES.

The differences in human features must be reckoned great, inasmuch
as they enable us to distinguish a single known face among those of
thousands of strangers, though they are mostly too minute for
measurement. At the same time, they are exceedingly numerous. The
general expression of a face is the sum of a multitude of small
details, which are viewed in such rapid succession that we seem to
p