It is interesting to note the theories of writers as Influence of to the effect produced on various races by the process Climate on Man of acclimatization. It has been asserted that the curly hair of the European reverts to the length and straightness of the original Indian type, among his American descendants; and while Englishmen are all fairly corpulent at home, and while there is a tendency for them to grow fat at the Cape,1 in the United States and Canada, as well as Australia, they are apt to become lean, and taller, as if steatopygy, or fatness of the buttocks, were a peculiarly British institution. It would be interesting, were the inquiry cognate, to trace the connection between these anthropomorphic changes, due to climatic and environmental causes, and the apparent inability of Europeans to found colonies in the tropics; the more so as we have only recently undertaken Buch an experiment ourselves; but those who desire to pursue such investigations further may do so in the works of Spencer, Darwin and Wallace.3

It may be pertinent to remark, however, that as, in the opinion of most British medical officers, an English regiment of a thousand men would completely die out, from disease and other casualties, in a period of thirteen years; and, as Springer has stated that a regiment of eight hundred men loses, within ten years, more than seven hundred, our prospective cost in men and money, from holding and colonizing the Philippines, is likely to prove not only great, but a repetition of every experience of the past in the same line. Of a third generation of Europeans in India, says Colonel Hadden, children only are met with, and they commonly die before the age of puberty; and Mr. Squier makes the equally startling statement that the pure whites of Central America are "not only relatively, but absolutely, decreasing in numbers; whilst the pure Indians are rapidly increasing, and the Ladinos more and more approximating the aboriginal type."*

1 Westermarck, he. cii., p. 268.

* See also on this siibjoct an able Paper by Dr. Felkin, in the Edinburgh Medical Journal, ill—II, 252.

The negroes of the United States have undergone a residence change which has left them at least two shades lighter in complexion than the primitive African; and Rohlfs records the case of an African boy who, after a residence with him in Germany of two years, was changed from a deep black to a light brown.1 In the "Philosophical Transactions" there is even a record of a negro who "became as white as a European;" but this, I am inclined to think, was probably a case of congenital or acquired leucoderma, which, by reason of its lesser frequency in Germany than in this country and the tropics, was less understood. All things considered, we may take it for granted that racial characteristics are very closely connected, in some way, with conditions and environments. Intermixture of blood has caused great confusions among racial types, which require the slow growth of years, sometimes, to eradicate; but the tendency among all races, notwithstanding the ingenious arguments and theories of the evolutionists, is to revert to, and not deviate from, the parent type. Thus the statement of Reclus, as quoted by Quatrefages,1 that "within a given time, whatever their origin, all the descendants of whites, or of negroes, who have emigrated to America, will become redskins," though extravagant, yet recognizes the great primitive principle I have noted, and is not devoid of a certain degree of support in the anthropomorphic changes at present undoubtedly going on among our people.