THE RACES OF MANKIND
Arthur Keith, conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, was the first to apply the principle of endocrine differentiation to the problem of the color-lines—the lines which have divided mankind crudely into the yellow, the red, the white and the brown, the Negro, the Mongol, the Caucasian, the copper tinted American. It has long been recognized by anthropologists that the differences of color march with differences in every comparable trait. Thus the ideal Negro is built upon a pattern in which all the elements are specific and singular. When the looms revolve that make him, there is produced a gleaming black skin, kinky black hair, squat wide-nostriled nose, thick protruding lips, large striking teeth, prominent jaws, and staring eyes. As his upright carriage and bone-muscle-fat proportions are distinctive, so are his musical voice and his easily wrought upon nerves. In contrast the Caucasian has a good deal of hair on his body, his skin is a pale tan-pink, his lips are thin, and his nose especially has the definite bridge which narrows it. The Mongol, like the Negro, has the hairless body and the beardless face, but unlike him has lank straight hair on his head, while his features are flattened and fore-shortened.
Upon the basis of these structural, functional and mental differences, the qualitative and quantitative evolution of which in the race as in the individual is guided by the glands of internal secretion, Keith presents a very good case for the view that the white man is an example of relative excess of the pituitary, thyroid, adrenal and gonad endocrines. "The sharp and pronounced nasalization of the face, the tendency to strong eyebrow ridges, the prominent chin, the tendency to bulk of body, and height of stature in the majority of Europeans" are the signs of pituitary dominance. Keith is also of the opinion that "the sexual differentiation, the robust manifestations of the male characters, is more emphatic in the Caucasian than in either the Mongol or Negro racial types … in certain negro types, especially in Nilotic tribes, with their long stork-like legs, we seem to have a manifestation of abeyance in the action of the interstitial glands." As for the adrenal superiority of the white man, "it is 150 years since John Hunter came to the conclusion … that the original color of man's skin was black, and all the knowledge that we have gathered since his supports the inference he drew. From the fact that pigment begins to collect and thus darken the skin when the adrenal bodies become the seat of a destructive disease we infer that they have to do with the clearing away of pigment, and that we Europeans owe the fairness of our skins to some particular virtue resident in the adrenal bodies." Finally, as regards the thyroid, a comparison of the face of a cretin with that of the Negro or Mongol tells the story. A certain variety of idiocy, Mongolian idiocy, in which the face simulates cretinism so closely as to deceive practised clinical observers, is characterized by a Chinese cast of the features and eyes, hence the name. And in the Bushman of South Africa, the cretin's face is even more startlingly recalled.
There is every reason then for believing that the white man possesses more of pituitary, adrenal, gonad, and thyroid internal secretions as compared with the yellow man or black man. And since these endocrines control not only physique and physiognomy, anatomic and functional minutiae, but also mind and behaviour, we are justified in putting down the white man's predominance on the planet to a greater all-around concentration in his blood of the omnipotent hormones. While the Negro is relatively subadrenal, the Mongol is relatively subthyroid. Their relative deficiency in internal secretions constitutes the essence of the White Man's Burden.
MAN'S ATTITUDE TOWARD HIMSELF
A last, but by no means least, application we may consider of the developing knowledge of the internal secretions in relation to human evolution is its effect upon Man's attitude toward himself and so toward his fellow men. Whatever else he is, man is a land animal with ideas. That makes him a thought-adventurer among materials. In a word, he is the last word of mind working upon matter. But persistently he has refused to recognize himself as matter and as subject to the laws, to the physics and chemistry of matter.
History consists of the protocols that record the high lights of the interactions of materials and ideas which is the adventure of man in time and space. Materials and ideas have reacted, the record shows; materials come upon have begotten strange fantasies. Ideas that flashed from nowhere into a consciousness have transformed utterly the face of the earth. The herd-brute, agglutinated with his fellows by a magnetism beyond his ken, could be infected with thought, and so cast in the heroic mould. The possibility of communion,—that possibility of possibilities, for without it none other could be possible—has rendered man the heir of a divine destiny. For the progressive education of the race, a single discoverer here, an inventor there, and thinkers everywhere have been inspired. In due time their inspiration becomes the possession of even the lowest brain but capable of grasping it.
Man's attitude toward himself, his self-consciousness, and his attitude toward his fellow creatures has grown and varied and evolved with his education about himself. According to the theory he formulated concerning his being, his why and wherefore, he directed and governed, punished and mutilated himself and them. But the pressure of his curiosity, and the inexorable quality of the truth would not let him stand still. The poetic genius within him, as Blake called it, struggled on from one dogma concerning his nature to another. Behaviour malignant or beneficent, horrible in its tragedy and pitiable in its comedy, flowed inevitably on. Witchcraft trials and the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition belong among the more mentionable consequences of some of man's theories about his own nature and its requirements.
Heretofore the imaginative spirit has had its day in the matter. And, curiously enough, an obsession to subjugate the natural has made it exalt the supernatural. Visions, dreams, portents, revelations, all symptomatic of an order of things above nature, are the stuff of what more than ninety-nine per cent of the millions of the race believe about themselves and their fate. Man's cruelty to man, through the ages, is a comment upon how vast and ramifying may be the consequences of a delusion.
But now for a couple of centuries the critical spirit, which is the spirit of science, has been invading the affairs of men. Humble but persistent corrosive of delusion, it has infiltrated the furthest bounds of ignorance and superstition. It has not dared to assert the supremacy of its fundamental views upon the everyday problems of human life because it was without concrete means of vindicating its claims. That lack is now supplied by the growing understanding of the chemical factors as the controllers and dictators of all the legion aspects of life.