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THE RACES OF MAN.
1247
THE
LANCET.
LONDON:SATURDAY. DECEMBER 15, 1928.
THE KING. THE
the KING’S illness has been authorised for publication to the medical profession. It is dated Wednesday, Dec. 12th, at
following
statement
on
3 P.M. "
To make clear the nature of this long and exhaustit is necessary to state that a general blood infection and toxsemia were in the first two weeks prominent features and caused at one time grave anxiety. Moreover, the case has not presented the characteristics of a typical pleuro-pneumonia. Seven days ago the evidences of general infection had become less prominent and the blood cultures were sterile, though all medical men will know that sterility of blood cultures is not conclusive evidence that general infection has ceased. During the last five days the temperature has again risen to a higher level, yet the pneumonic and pleural signs became at the same time less marked, and neither pleural puncture nor study of new and excellent radiograms disclosed any appreciable effusion. Seeing, however, that the had involved the diaphragm, a original pleurisy careful watch has been kept for the formation of fluid between the lung and the diaphragm and its extension to the posterior pulmonary surface. This morning there were signs of this development accompanied by an increased leucocytosis. By
ing illness,
exploratory puncture at the right extreme posterior base purulent fluid was obtained which contains organisms morphologically resembling those previously found in the blood stream. Drainage will now be performed. Though this pleural localisation of the infection, so anxiously anticipated and looked for, makes the direction of advance more defined and hopeful, there is still in prospect a long and difficult
struggle." go to press we learn that an operation has been carried out successfully, and that drainage of As
we
pus is proceeding. Sir HUGH RIGBY was the surgeon The and Dr. FRANCIS SHIPWAY the ansesthetist. position is so far satisfactory, and those who are conversant with the significance in these
of symptoms and their will recognise that we have here foundation for the renewal of legitimate course cases
hopes. THE RACES OF MAN. PERICLES said that the citizen who holds aloof from public affairs is not merely harmless but useless. THOMAS HENRY HuxLEY certainly did his best to apply the art of natural knowledge to human welfare, and on
the first Sunday after Epiphany in 1870 he went to St. George’s Hall in Langham-place to argue that the people of Ireland were so little different from the people of England that political separation could not be justified on the ground of racial distinction. He wanted common men as well as scientists to perceive the truths of ethnology and so to know what they ought to do in the hope that they would have power, to fulfil their convictions in practice. There were to Huxr,Ey, and are still, four great divisions of mankind -the nordic type of Europe, the negroid of Africa, the mongolian of Eastern Asia, and the Australian aboriginal ; the precise number of subgroups is a matter of taste-there may be 40. HUXLEY regarded the obvious intermediates by which these groups’ grade into one another as the result of hybridisation, of the mixture of what were primarily separate. He recognised the British as a mixture of yellow nordics and black mediterraneans, and saw that Englishr Welsh, Scottish, and Irish differ only in their relativeproportions of these two components. Hence he refused to admit that any body of people in these’ islands was distinct enough to be called a race. It was perhaps a natural conclusion for a zoologist; he wanted races as pure and sharply separated as those which are perceptible in animals and plants, and if intermediate forms are due to hybrilisation, the product is necessarily indeterminate and uncharacteristic. In his Huxley Memorial Lecture to the Royal Anthropological Institute,l Sir ARTHUR KEITH offers another interpretation of the facts. He urges that the mixed populations which are so common may as well be the result of incomplete differentiation as of partial fusion. Pure races have evolved to the state where every individual is physically recognisable at sight ; the races in Britain are partly differentiated and only a proportion of each have distinctivebodily characters which are diagnostic. Interbreeding, of course, occurs, but he regards this as relatively unimportant, and as a good Darwinian he attributes the differentiation of man to variation, selection, and, isolation. Of the physiological processes involved in. natural variation, he attributes chief importance to the ductless glands-an attractive hypothesis with a slender foundation of ascertained fact which he has put forward before. Selection is involved in changes in the environment and in inter-racial competition. To isolation as a factor in fixing and maintaining specific characters, evolutionists attach more and more importance ; some indeed would go so far as to say that speciation is impossible without it. And it is in isolation and segregation that nations and races find their contact as units of classification. The barrier between groups may be physical or political or psychological-anything which prevents free intermingling and interbreeding may be effective. Hence a range of mountains or a Mussolini law or incompatibility of temperament or a different scale of spiritual values may help to fix a racial type. Political nations are by no means ethnological races, but they are on the way to become so, and the last hundred years have seenthe conflict between an exaggerated nationalism which favours segregation and a spatial shrinkage of the world which goes to undo it. If Hu-xLEY’s view was correct, racial distinctions will become less and less and, as Sir ARTHUR KEITH says, he is a man with whom it is always dangerous to disagree. 1 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1928, lviii., 305.
THE
LANCET.
LONDON:SATURDAY. DECEMBER 15, 1928.
THE KING. THE
the KING’S illness has been authorised for publication to the medical profession. It is dated Wednesday, Dec. 12th, at
following
statement
on
3 P.M. "
To make clear the nature of this long and exhaustit is necessary to state that a general blood infection and toxsemia were in the first two weeks prominent features and caused at one time grave anxiety. Moreover, the case has not presented the characteristics of a typical pleuro-pneumonia. Seven days ago the evidences of general infection had become less prominent and the blood cultures were sterile, though all medical men will know that sterility of blood cultures is not conclusive evidence that general infection has ceased. During the last five days the temperature has again risen to a higher level, yet the pneumonic and pleural signs became at the same time less marked, and neither pleural puncture nor study of new and excellent radiograms disclosed any appreciable effusion. Seeing, however, that the had involved the diaphragm, a original pleurisy careful watch has been kept for the formation of fluid between the lung and the diaphragm and its extension to the posterior pulmonary surface. This morning there were signs of this development accompanied by an increased leucocytosis. By
ing illness,
exploratory puncture at the right extreme posterior base purulent fluid was obtained which contains organisms morphologically resembling those previously found in the blood stream. Drainage will now be performed. Though this pleural localisation of the infection, so anxiously anticipated and looked for, makes the direction of advance more defined and hopeful, there is still in prospect a long and difficult
struggle." go to press we learn that an operation has been carried out successfully, and that drainage of As
we
pus is proceeding. Sir HUGH RIGBY was the surgeon The and Dr. FRANCIS SHIPWAY the ansesthetist. position is so far satisfactory, and those who are conversant with the significance in these
of symptoms and their will recognise that we have here foundation for the renewal of legitimate course cases
hopes. THE RACES OF MAN. PERICLES said that the citizen who holds aloof from public affairs is not merely harmless but useless. THOMAS HENRY HuxLEY certainly did his best to apply the art of natural knowledge to human welfare, and on
the first Sunday after Epiphany in 1870 he went to St. George’s Hall in Langham-place to argue that the people of Ireland were so little different from the people of England that political separation could not be justified on the ground of racial distinction. He wanted common men as well as scientists to perceive the truths of ethnology and so to know what they ought to do in the hope that they would have power, to fulfil their convictions in practice. There were to Huxr,Ey, and are still, four great divisions of mankind -the nordic type of Europe, the negroid of Africa, the mongolian of Eastern Asia, and the Australian aboriginal ; the precise number of subgroups is a matter of taste-there may be 40. HUXLEY regarded the obvious intermediates by which these groups’ grade into one another as the result of hybridisation, of the mixture of what were primarily separate. He recognised the British as a mixture of yellow nordics and black mediterraneans, and saw that Englishr Welsh, Scottish, and Irish differ only in their relativeproportions of these two components. Hence he refused to admit that any body of people in these’ islands was distinct enough to be called a race. It was perhaps a natural conclusion for a zoologist; he wanted races as pure and sharply separated as those which are perceptible in animals and plants, and if intermediate forms are due to hybrilisation, the product is necessarily indeterminate and uncharacteristic. In his Huxley Memorial Lecture to the Royal Anthropological Institute,l Sir ARTHUR KEITH offers another interpretation of the facts. He urges that the mixed populations which are so common may as well be the result of incomplete differentiation as of partial fusion. Pure races have evolved to the state where every individual is physically recognisable at sight ; the races in Britain are partly differentiated and only a proportion of each have distinctivebodily characters which are diagnostic. Interbreeding, of course, occurs, but he regards this as relatively unimportant, and as a good Darwinian he attributes the differentiation of man to variation, selection, and, isolation. Of the physiological processes involved in. natural variation, he attributes chief importance to the ductless glands-an attractive hypothesis with a slender foundation of ascertained fact which he has put forward before. Selection is involved in changes in the environment and in inter-racial competition. To isolation as a factor in fixing and maintaining specific characters, evolutionists attach more and more importance ; some indeed would go so far as to say that speciation is impossible without it. And it is in isolation and segregation that nations and races find their contact as units of classification. The barrier between groups may be physical or political or psychological-anything which prevents free intermingling and interbreeding may be effective. Hence a range of mountains or a Mussolini law or incompatibility of temperament or a different scale of spiritual values may help to fix a racial type. Political nations are by no means ethnological races, but they are on the way to become so, and the last hundred years have seenthe conflict between an exaggerated nationalism which favours segregation and a spatial shrinkage of the world which goes to undo it. If Hu-xLEY’s view was correct, racial distinctions will become less and less and, as Sir ARTHUR KEITH says, he is a man with whom it is always dangerous to disagree. 1 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1928, lviii., 305.