natives, and not as the direct result of climate. Ellsworth Huntington, the most recent and careful student of the effect of climate on man,3 finds that climate has a great deal of influence on man's energy, but as far as inherited traits in general are concerned, he is constantly led to remark how little heredity is capable of being changed.
Most members of the white race have little toes that are partly atrophied, and considerably deformed. In many cases one of the joints has undergone ankylosis—that is, the bones have coalesced. It is confidently alleged that this is due to the inheritance of the effects of wearing tight shoes through many centuries. When it is found that the prehistoric Egyptians, who knew not tight shoes, suffered from the same defect in a similar degree, one's confidence in this kind of evidence is much diminished.
The retrogression of the little toe in man is probably to be explained like the degeneration of the