It will be found, as M. de Quatrefages has well remarked, that while men are less delicate in this respect, women persistently refuse to lower themselves by the sexual choice, unless depraved by drink, drugs, or some other unseemly or brutalizing habit.* Thus, while during the reign of slavery in the South, whilst men frequently debased themselves with black women, the cases are, so far as my reading has extended, practically nil where the reverse proposition proved true. The woman always love* above herself; the man, in a general sense, promiscuously.

Dr. Nott, writing in the middle of the past century, asserts that he never met with a half-breed who was the offspring of union between a negro man and a white woman;1 and I think that careful investigation would develop a similar condition in lower class society today; unless in those comparatively rare cases due, as I have intimated, to causes other than normal. In New Zealand, European men occasionally marry Maori women; but Mr. Kerry Nicholls states quite positively that he never knew of a case where a European woman had married a Maori man.1

The question of race miscegenation, however, is an anthropological, if not a zoological one; the means resorted to among savages to attract the attention and admiration of the opposite sex being those common to most animals. Chief among these are gaudiness of plumage, as in birds and, shall I say it? women. Softness and coloring of skin, as in the leopard; and musical sweetness of the voice, as in the educated lady and the singing bird. But Mr. Darwin, with his customary keenness in investigation, found another principle which he holds, and rightly so, to be common to both men and animals—that the female gives preference, other things being equal, to "the most vigorous, defiant and mettlesome of the males."