Robert Marett - Anthropology
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Robert Marett >> Anthropology
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After all, the plain man must remember that the effects of use and
disuse, which he seems to see everywhere about him, are mixed up with
plenty of apparent instances to the contrary. He will smile, perhaps,
when I tell him that Weismann cut off the tails of endless mice, and,
breeding them together, found that tails invariably decorated the race
as before. I remember hearing Mr. Bernard Shaw comment on this
experiment. He was defending the Lamarckianism of Samuel Butler, who
declared that our heredity was a kind of race-memory, a lapsed
intelligence. "Why," said Mr. Shaw, "did the mice continue to grow
tails? Because they never wanted to have them cut off." But men-folk
are wont to shave off their beards because they want to have them off;
and, amongst people more conservative in their habits than ourselves,
such a custom may persist through numberless generations. Yet who ever
observed the slightest signs of beardlessness being produced in this
way? On the other hand, there are beardless as well as bearded races
in the world; and, by crossing them, you could, doubtless, soon produce
ups and downs in the razor-trade. Only, as Weismann's school would
say, the required variation is in this case spontaneous, that is, comes
entirely of its own accord.
Leaving the question of use-inheritance open, I pass on to say a word
about variation as considered in itself and apart from this doubtful
influence. Weismann holds, that organisms resulting from the union
of two cells are more variable than those produced out of a single
one. On this view, variation depends largely on the laws of the
interaction of the dissimilar characters brought together in
cell-union. But what are these laws? The best that can be said is that
we are getting to know a little more about them every day. Amongst
other lines of inquiry, the so-called Mendelian experiments promise
to clear up much that is at present dark.
The development of the individual that results from such cell-union
is no mere mixture or addition, but a process of selective organization.
To put it very absurdly, one does not find a pair of two-legged parents
having a child with legs as big as the two sets of legs together, or
with four legs, two of them of one shape and two of another. In other
words, of the possibilities contributed by the father and mother, some
are taken and some are left in the case of any one child. Further,
different children will represent different selections from amongst
the germinal elements. Mendelism, by the way, is especially concerned
to find out the law according to which the different types of
organization are distributed between the offspring. Each child,
meanwhile, is a unique individual, a living whole with an organization
of its very own. This means that its constituent elements form a system.
They stand to each other in relations of mutual support. In short,
life is possible because there is balance.
This general state of balance, however, is able to go along with a
lot of special balancings that seem largely independent of each other.
It is important to remember this when we come a little later on to
consider the instincts. All sorts of lesser systems prevail within
the larger system represented by the individual organism. It is just
as if within the state with its central government there were a number
of county councils, municipal corporations, and so on, each of them
enjoying a certain measure of self-government on its own account. Thus
we can see in a very general way how it is that so much variation is
possible. The selective organization, which from amongst the germinal
elements precipitates ever so many and different forms of fresh life,
is so loose and elastic that a working arrangement between the parts
can be reached in all sorts of directions. The lesser systems are so
far self-governing that they can be trusted to get along in almost
any combination; though of course some combinations are naturally
stronger and more stable than the rest, and hence tend to outlast them,
or, as the phrase goes, to be preserved by natural selection.
It is time to take account of the principle of natural selection. We
have done with the subject of variation. Whether use and disuse have
helped to shape the fresh forms of life, or whether these are purely
spontaneous combinations that have come into being on what we are
pleased to call their own account, at any rate let us take them as
given. What happens now? At this point begins the work of natural
selection. Darwin's great achievement was to formulate this law;
though it is only fair to add that it was discovered by A.R. Wallace
at the same moment. Both of them get the first hint of it from Malthus.
This English clergyman, writing about half a century earlier, had shown
that the growth of population is apt very considerably to outstrip
the development of food-supply; whereupon natural checks such as
famine or war must, he argued, ruthlessly intervene so as to redress
the balance. Applying these considerations to the plant and animal
kingdoms at large, Darwin and Wallace perceived that, of the
multitudinous forms of life thrust out upon the world to get a
livelihood as best they could, a vast quantity must be weeded out.
Moreover, since they vary exceedingly in their type of organization,
it seemed reasonable to suppose that, of the competitors, those who
were innately fitted to make the best of the ever-changing
circumstances would outlive the rest. An appeal to the facts fully
bore out this hypothesis. It must not, indeed, be thought that all
the weeding out which goes on favours the fittest. Accidents will
always happen. On the whole, however, the type that is most at home
under the surrounding conditions, it may be because it is more complex,
or it may be because it is of simpler organization, survives the rest.
Now to survive is to survive to breed. If you live to eighty, and have
no children, you do not survive in the biological sense; whereas your
neighbour who died at forty may survive in a numerous progeny. Natural
selection is always in the last resort between individuals; because
individuals are alone competent to breed. At the same time, the reason
for the individual's survival may lie very largely outside him. Amongst
the bees, for instance, a non-working type of insect survives to breed
because the sterile workers do their duty by the hive. So, too, that
other social animal, man, carries on the race by means of some whom
others die childless in order to preserve. Nevertheless, breeding
being a strictly individual and personal affair, there is always a
risk lest a society, through spending its best too freely, end by
recruiting its numbers from those in whom the engrained capacity to
render social service is weakly developed. To rear a goodly family
must always be the first duty of unselfish people; for otherwise the
spirit of unselfishness can hardly be kept alive the world.
Enough about heredity as a condition of evolution. We return, with
a better chance of distinguishing them, to the consideration of the
special effects that it brings about. It was said just now that heredity
is the stiffening in human nature, a stiffening bound up with a more
or less considerable offset of plasticity. Now clearly it is in some
sense true that the child's whole nature, its modicum of plasticity
included, is handed on from its parents. Our business in this chapter,
however, is on the whole to put out of our thoughts this plastic side
of the inherited life-force. The more or less rigid, definite,
systematized characters--these form the hereditary factor, the race.
Now none of these are ever quite fixed. A certain measure of plasticity
has to be counted in as part of their very nature. Even in the bee,
with its highly definite instincts, there is a certain flexibility
bound up with each of these; so that, for instance, the inborn faculty
of building up the comb regularly is modified if the hive happens to
be of an awkward shape. Yet, as compared with what remains over, the
characters that we are able to distinguish as racial must show fixity.
Unfortunately, habits show fixity too. Yet habits belong to the plastic
side of our nature; for, in forming a habit, we are plastic at the
start, though hardly so once we have let ourselves go. Habits, then,
must be discounted in our search for the hereditary bias in our lives.
It is no use trying to disguise the difficulties attending an inquiry
into race.
* * * * *
These difficulties notwithstanding, in the rest of this chapter let
us consider a few of what are usually taken to be racial features of
man. As before, the treatment must be illustrative; we cannot work
through the list. Further, we must be content with a very rough division
into bodily and mental features. Just at this point we shall find it
very hard to say what is to be reckoned bodily and what mental. Leaving
these niceties to the philosophers, however, let us go ahead as best
we can.
Oh for an external race-mark about which there could be no mistake!
That has always been a dream of the anthropologist; but it is a dream
that shows no signs of coming true. All sorts of tests of this kind
have been suggested. Cranium, cranial sutures, frontal process, nasal
bones, eye, chin, jaws, wisdom teeth, hair, humerus, pelvis, the
heart-line across the hand, calf, tibia, heel, colour, and even
smell--all these external signs, as well as many more, have been
thought, separately or together, to afford the crucial test of a man's
pedigree. Clearly I cannot here cross-examine the entire crowd of
claimants, were I even competent to do so. I shall, therefore, say
a few words about two, and two only, namely, head-form and colour.
I believe that, if the plain man were to ask himself how, in walking
down a London street, he distinguished one racial type from another,
he would find that he chiefly went by colour. In a general way he knows
how to make allowance for sunburn and get down to the native complexion
underneath. But, if he went off presently to a museum and tried to
apply his test to the pre-historic men on view there, it would fail
for the simple reason that long ago they left their skins behind them.
He would have to get to work, therefore, on their bony parts, and
doubtless would attack the skulls for choice. By considering head-form
and colour, then, we may help to cover a certain amount of the ground,
vast as it is. For remember that anthropology in this department draws
no line between ancient and modern, or between savage and civilized,
but tries to tackle every sort of man that comes within its reach.
Head-shape is really a far more complicated thing to arrive at for
purposes of comparison than one might suppose. Since no part of the
skull maintains a stable position in regard to the rest, there can
be no fixed standard of measurement, but at most a judgment of likeness
or unlikeness founded on an averaging of the total proportions. Thus
it comes about that, in the last resort, the impression of a good expert
is worth in these matters a great deal more than rows of figures.
Moreover, rows of figures in their turn take a lot of understanding.
Besides, they are not always easy to get. This is especially the case
if you are measuring a live subject. Perhaps he is armed with a club,
and may take amiss the use of an instrument that has to be poked into
his ears, or what not. So, for one reason or another, we have often
to put up with that very unsatisfactory single-figure description of
the head-form which is known as the cranial index. You take the greatest
length and greatest breadth of the skull, and write down the result
obtained by dividing the former into the latter when multiplied by
100. Medium-headed people have an index of anything between 75 and
80. Below that figure men rank as long-headed, above it as round-headed.
This test, however, as I have hinted, will not by itself carry us far.
On the other hand, I believe that a good judge of head-form in all
its aspects taken together will generally be able to make a pretty
shrewd guess as to the people amongst whom the owner of a given skull
is to be placed.
Unfortunately, to say people is not to say race. It may be that a given
people tend to have a characteristic head-form, not so much because
they are of common breed, as because they are subjected after birth,
or at any rate, after conception, to one and the same environment.
Thus some careful observations made recently by Professor Boas on
American immigrants from various parts of Europe seem to show that
the new environment does in some unexplained way modify the head-form
to a remarkable extent. For example, amongst the East European Jews
the head of the European-born is shorter and wider than that of the
American-born, the difference being even more marked in the second
generation of the American-born. At the same time, other European
nationalities exhibit changes of other kinds, all these changes,
however, being in the direction of a convergence towards one and the
same American type. How are we to explain these facts, supposing them
to be corroborated by more extensive studies? It would seem that we
must at any rate allow for a considerable plasticity in the head-form,
whereby it is capable of undergoing decisive alteration under the
influences of environment; not, of course, at any moment during life,
but during those early days when the growth of the head is especially
rapid. The further question whether such an acquired character can
be transmitted we need not raise again. Before passing on, however,
let this one word to the wise be uttered. If the skull can be so affected,
then what about the brain inside it? If the hereditarily long-headed
can change under suitable conditions, then what about the hereditarily
short-witted?
It remains to say a word about the types of pre-historic men as judged
by their bony remains and especially by their skulls. Naturally the
subject bristles with uncertainties.
By itself stands the so-called Pithecanthropus (Ape-man) of Java, a
regular "missing link." The top of the skull, several teeth, and a
thigh-bone, found at a certain distance from each other, are all that
we have of it or him. Dr. Dubois, their discoverer, has made out a
fairly strong case for supposing that the geological stratum in which
the remains occurred is Pliocene--that is to say, belongs to the
Tertiary epoch, to which man has not yet been traced back with any
strong probability. It must remain, however, highly doubtful whether
this is a proto-human being, or merely an ape of a type related to
the gibbon. The intermediate character is shown especially in the head
form. If an ape, Pithecanthropus had an enormous brain; if a man, he
must have verged on what we should consider idiocy.
Also standing somewhat by itself is the Heidelberg man. All that we
have of him is a well-preserved lower jaw with its teeth. It was found
more than eighty feet below the surface of the soil, in company with
animal remains that make it possible to fix its position in the scale
of pre-historic periods with some accuracy. Judged by this test, it
is as old as the oldest of the unmistakable drift implements, the
so-called Chellean (from Chelles in the department of Seine-et-Marne
in France). The jaw by itself would suggest a gorilla, being both
chinless and immensely powerful. The teeth, however, are human beyond
question, and can be matched, or perhaps even in respect to certain
marks of primitiveness out-matched, amongst ancient skulls of the
Neanderthal order, if not also amongst modern ones from Australia.
We may next consider the Neanderthal group of skulls, so named after
the first of that type found in 1856 in the Neanderthal valley close
to Dusseldorf in the Rhine basin. A narrow head, with low and retreating
forehead, and a thick projecting brow-ridge, yet with at least twice
the brain capacity of any gorilla, set the learned world disputing
whether this was an ape, a normal man, or an idiot. It was unfortunate
that there were no proofs to hand of the age of these relics. After
a while, however, similar specimens began to come in. Thus in 1866
the jaw of a woman, displaying a tendency to chinlessness combined
with great strength, was found in the Cave of La Naulette in Belgium,
associated with more or less dateable remains of the mammoth, woolly
rhinoceros and reindeer. A few years earlier, though its importance
was not appreciated at the moment, there had been discovered, near
Forbes' quarry at Gibraltar, the famous Gibraltar skull, now to be
seen in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Any
visitor will notice at the first glance that this is no man of to-day.
There are the narrow head, low crown, and prominent brow-ridge as
before, supplemented by the most extraordinary eye-holes that were
ever seen, vast circles widely separated from each other. And other
peculiar features will reveal themselves on a close inspection; for
instance, the horseshoe form in which, ape-fashion, the teeth are
arranged, and the muzzle-like shape of the face due to the absence
of the depressions that in our own case run down on each side from
just outside the nostrils towards the corners of the mouth.
And now at the present time we have twenty or more individuals of this
Neanderthal type to compare. The latest discoveries are perhaps the
most interesting, because in two and perhaps other cases the man has
been properly buried. Thus at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the French
department of Correze, a skeleton, which in its head-form closely
recalls the Gibraltar example, was found in a pit dug in the floor
of a low grotto. It lay on its back, head to the west, with one arm
bent towards the head, the other outstretched, and the legs drawn up.
Some bison bones lay in the grave as if a food-offering had been made.
Hard by were flint implements of a well-marked Mousterian type. In
the shelter of Le Moustier itself a similar burial was discovered.
The body lay on its right side, with the right arm bent so as to support
the head upon a carefully arranged pillow of flints; whilst the left
arm was stretched out, so that the hand might be near a magnificent
oval stone-weapon chipped on both faces, evidently laid there by design.
So much for these men of the Neanderthal type, denizens of the
mid-palaeolithic world at the very latest. Ape-like they doubtless
are in their head-form up to a certain point, though almost all their
separate features occur here and there amongst modern Australian
natives. And yet they were men enough, had brains enough, to believe
in a life after death. There is something to think about in that.
Without going outside Europe, we have, however, to reckon with at least
two other types of very early head-form.
In one of the caves of Mentone known as La Grotte des Enfants two
skeletons from a low stratum were of a primitive type, but unlike the
Neanderthal, and have been thought to show affinities to the modern
negro. As, however, no other Proto-Negroes are indisputably
forthcoming either from Europe or from any other part of the world,
there is little at present to be made out about this interesting racial
type.
In the layer immediately above the negroid remains, however, as well
as in other caves at Mentone, were the bones of individuals of quite
another order, one being positively a giant. They are known as the
Cro-Magnon race, after a group of them discovered in a rock shelter
of that name on the banks of the Vezere. These particular people can
be shown to be Aurignacian--that is to say, to have lived just after
the Mousterian men of the Neanderthal head-form. If, however, as has
been already suggested, the Galley Hill individual, who shows
affinities to the Cro-Magnon type, really goes back to the drift-period,
then we can believe that from very early times there co-existed in
Europe at least two varieties; and these so distinct, that some
authorities would trace the original divergence between them right
back to the times before man and the apes had parted company, linking
the Neanderthal race with the gorilla and the Cro-Magnon race with
the orang. The Cro-Magnon head-form is refined and highly developed.
The forehead is high, and the chin shapely, whilst neither the
brow-ridge nor the lower jaw protrudes as in the Neanderthal type.
Whether this race survives in modern Europe is, as was said in the
last chapter, highly uncertain. In certain respects--for instance,
in a certain shortness of face--these people present exceptional
features; though some think they can still find men of this type in
the Dordogne district. Perhaps the chances are, however, considering
how skulls of the neolithic period prove to be anything but uniform,
and suggest crossings between different stocks, that we may claim
kinship to some extent with the more good-looking of the two main types
of palaeolithic man--always supposing that head-form can be taken as
a guide. But can it? The Pygmies of the Congo region have medium heads;
the Bushmen of South Africa, usually regarded as akin in race, have
long heads. The American Indians, generally supposed to be all, or
nearly all, of one racial type, show considerable differences of
head-form; and so on. It need not be repeated that any race-mark is
liable to deceive.
* * * * *
We have sufficiently considered the use to which the particular
race-mark of head-form has been put in the attempted classification
of the very early men who have left their bones behind them. Let us
now turn to another race-mark, namely colour; because, though it may
really be less satisfactory than others, for instance hair, that is
the one to which ordinary people naturally turn when they seek to
classify by races the present inhabitants of the earth.
When Linnaeus in pre-Darwinian days distinguished four varieties of
man, the white European, the red American, the yellow Asiatic, and
the black African, he did not dream of providing the basis of anything
more than an artificial classification. He probably would have agreed
with Buffon in saying that in every case it was one and the same kind
of man, only dyed differently by the different climates. But the
Darwinian is searching for a natural classification. He wants to
distinguish men according to their actual descent. Now race and descent
mean for him the same thing. Hence a race-mark, if one is to be found,
must stand for, by co-existing with, the whole mass of properties that
form the inheritance. Can colour serve for a race-mark in this profound
sense? That is the only question here.
First of all, what is the use of being coloured one way or the other?
Does it make any difference? Is it something, like the heart-line of
the hand, that may go along with useful qualities, but in itself seems
to be a meaningless accident? Well, as some unfortunate people will
be able to tell you, colour is still a formidable handicap in the
struggle for existence. Not to consider the colour-prejudice in other
aspects, there is no gainsaying the part it plays in sexual selection
at this hour. The lower animals appear to be guided in the choice of
a mate by externals of a striking and obvious sort. And men and women
to this day marry more with their eyes than with their heads.
The coloration of man, however, though it may have come to subserve
the purposes of mating, does not seem in its origin to have been like
the bright coloration of the male bird. It was not something wholly
useless save as a means of sexual attraction, though in such a capacity
useful because a mark of vital vigour. Colour almost certainly
developed in strict relation to climate. Right away in the back ages
we must place what Bagehot has called the race-making epoch, when the
chief bodily differences, including differences of colour, arose
amongst men. In those days, we may suppose, natural selection acted
largely on the body, because mind had not yet become the prime condition
of survival. The rest is a question of pre-historic geography. Within
the tropics, the habitat of the man-like apes, and presumably of the
earliest men, a black skin protects against sunlight. A white skin,
on the other hand--though this is more doubtful--perhaps economizes
sun-heat in colder latitudes. Brown, yellow and the so-called red are
intermediate tints suitable to intermediate regions. It is not hard
to plot out in the pre-historic map of the world geographical provinces,
or "areas of characterization," where races of different shades
corresponding to differences in the climate might develop, in an
isolation more or less complete, such as must tend to reinforce the
process of differentiation.
Let it not be forgotten, however, that individual plasticity plays
its part too in the determination of human colour. The Anglo-Indian
planter is apt to return from a long sojourn in the East with his skin
charged with a dark pigment which no amount of Pears' soap will remove
during the rest of his life. It would be interesting to conduct
experiments, on the lines of those of Professor Boas already mentioned,
with the object of discovering in what degree the same capacity for
amassing protective pigment declares itself in children of European
parentage born in the tropics or transplanted thither during infancy.
Correspondingly, the tendency of dark stocks to bleach in cold
countries needs to be studied. In the background, too, lurks the
question whether such effects of individual plasticity can be
transmitted to offspring, and become part of the inheritance.
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