Anthropology by R. R. (Robert Ranulph) Marett
page 41 of 212 (19%)
page 41 of 212 (19%)
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more likely to confuse a small dark Welshman with a broad florid
Yorkshireman than a retriever with a mastiff. Yes, but remember that you are judging by the gross impression, not by the element of race or breed as distinguished from the rest. Here, you say, come a couple of our American cousins. Perhaps it is their speech that betrayeth them; or perhaps it is the general cut of their jib. If you were to go into their actual pedigrees, you would find that the one had a Scotch father and a mother from out of Dorset; whilst the other was partly Scandinavian and partly Spanish with a tincture of Jew. Yet to all intents and purposes they form one type. And, the more deeply you go into it, the more mixed we all of us turn out to be, when breed, and breed alone, is the subject of inquiry. Yet race, in the only sense that the word has for an anthropologist, means inherited breed, and nothing more or less--inherited breed, and all that it covers, whether bodily or mental features. For race, let it not be forgotten, presumably extends to mind as well as to body. It is not merely skin-deep. Contrast the stoical Red Indian with the vivacious Negro; or the phlegmatic Dutchman with the passionate Italian. True, you say, but what about the influence of their various climates, or again of their different ideals of behaviour? Quite so. It is immensely difficult to separate the effects of the various factors. Yet surely the race-factor counts for something in the mental constitution. Any breeder of horses will tell you that neither the climate of Newmarket, nor careful training, nor any quantity of oats, nor anything else, will put racing mettle into cart-horse stock. In what follows, then, I shall try to show just what the problem about |
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