ATAVISMS.
This phenomenon, moreover, is but the anthropological expression of a more general biological law, in virtue of which human races, in order to adapt themselves to the medium in which they are developed, assume a uniform physical type and character, which persists, or repeats itself anatomically and psychically through the ages, in spite of the external forms of their civilization; in the same way as do other animals, and plants. Thus, for example, since the days of Trajan the bullocks of the Danube have had enormous and diverging horns; in China the cattle are hump-backed, despite cross-breeding with other strains; and, although the first offspring from crossing may be like the foreign parent, in the fifth or sixth generation there appears in the creole calf the hump of the original and native form. Among the ancient castas of the vice-reinal society the negro was seen to reappear in families of white, or even of red parentage, provided there had been blacks in the ancestry. In the waters of the Nile, the lotus yet floats its blue corolla, which the architects of Memphis copied in the capitals of their temples; and the Fellah of Pharaonic days reappears in families crossed with the Macedonians of the Ptolemies; and, in the first centuries of the Arab domination, in spite of the torrents of foreign blood introduced by polygamy. Even today the type reasserts itself in the native regiments of the English army at Cairo—bronzed, titanic, full-chested, a living model, which is copied in the colossi of Isamboul and which is the ethnic brother type of the Rameses and Amenhotep.
In the central tableland of Mexico, arid, hot, and luminous, where the atmosphere keeps the nerves at high tension; where thoughts are clouded by the abuse of tobacco, of alcohol and of coffee; by the irritation of an eternal and fruitless battle for life; and, until lately, by the frightful