in different cages of the Zoological Gardens; and however diverse and
antagonistic they are, each may be good of its kind. It is obviously
so in brutes; the monkey may have a horror at the sight of a snake,
and a repugnance to its ways, but a snake is just as perfect an
animal 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