Note 36 — Chapter III · THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY

Thus supposing, for example, a cross between English and Japanese. Both these have now attained to the same high point of intellectual and social developments, the Japanese being probably more artistic and refined, the Englishman possibly more dominant. If these varieties developed from ancestors lower in the scale of growth than either are at present, then their offspring might revert to that type and be lower than either parent form; but it is also quite possible that other factors may come into play, and the extreme refinement and artistic instinct of the Japanese, combining with the coarser virility of the Englishman, might produce a creature higher in the scale of life and more desirable than either parent species. All that we are qualified to assert in the present infantile stage of our knowledge is, that there is a danger, and we are inclined to believe a very great danger, of reversion to the lower primitive type where two widely severed varieties cross, that humanity may by that process lose the results of hundreds of years of slow evolution.