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CHAPTER XIII

up energy in the body, for it has been proved that work decreases rather than increases the amount of energy in the body. How is it, then, that training increases a man's efficiency? It is obviously by improving his "structure," and probably the most important part of this improvement is in bringing about better relations between the muscles and the nerves. To pursue the analogy which Mr. Redfield so often misuses, the effect of training on the human machine is merely to oil the bearings and straighten out bent parts, to make it a more efficient transformer of the energy that is supplied to it.

The foundation stone of Mr. Redfield's hypothesis is his idea that the animal by working stores up energy. This idea is the exact reverse of the truth. While the facts which Mr. Redfield has gathered deserve much study, his idea of "Dynamic Evolution" need not be taken seriously.81

APPENDIX C

THE "MELTING POT"

America as the "Melting Pot" of peoples is a picture often drawn by writers who do not trouble themselves as to the precision of their figures of speech. It has been supposed by many that all the racial stocks in the United States were tending toward a uniform type. There has never been any real evidence on which to base such a view, and the study completed in 1917 by Dr. Aleš Hrdlička, curator of the division of physical anthropology of the U. S. National Museum, furnishes evidence against it. He examined 400 individuals of the Old White American stock, that is, persons all of whose ancestors had been in the United States as far as the fourth ascending generation. He found little or no evidence that hereditary traits had been altered. Even the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, the Virginia cavaliers, the Pennsylvania Dutch and the Huguenots,

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