Industrial development, however, brought another change which gave fresh life to socialistic theory. Businesses grew larger, and owing to improvements in communication, the world grew relatively smaller. Public services developed which were in their nature more or less of monopolies-water, gas, electric light, railways, tramways. The owners of such undertakings may be able to raise a tax on the community as the price of these services. They may become 'profiteers' and act without regard to social conscience. Almost in self-defence the community undertook the management of water, gas, and tramway businesses. At the same time the number of civil servants greatly increased. The standard of Government and municipal service amongst British officials was high. Our civil servants sprang from classes trained to high ideals of service, in other words with a highly developed social conscience so far as their actual work was concerned. But as numbers increase the social conscience of public servants tends not to be stimulated, but to weaken. Moreover, a system of routine is produced which is detrimental to initiative and experiment.

Only a very high standard of development of the social conscience can maintain State employment or municipal employment reasonably efficient and reasonably free from corrupting influences. The same standard of social conscience under a system of Individualism will produce finer achievement in the more bracing atmosphere of individual responsibility, individual effort, and individual freedom. Individualism, unless guided by social conscience, is doomed; but in that case the collapse of the State is not far distant, and the members composing the State, after a great reduction in their numbers from some form of warfareperhaps only an economic warfare-will have to start again to rebuild civilisation upon the foundations of Individualism. And that new civilisation in turn will succeed only to the extent to which social conscience guides its efforts.

R. M. MONTGOMERY.

VOL. XCVII-No. 580

3 L

HUXLEY'S RACIAL LINEAGE

WITH A REVISION OF HIS VIEWS CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE

THE celebrations which marked the centenary of Huxley's birthhe was born on May 4, 1825-are sufficient to assure us that his memory is still fresh and green in the minds of men of science. Thirty years have passed since his death; we, his contemporaries and successors, can now look back and see him against the perspective of the past and take some measure of his permanent greatness. We can see that his was a giant figure in one of the most progressive and stirring epochs of England's intellectual history. We see him, like a Colossus, striding two periods-an old period, when it was still possible for a biologist to take all departments of the kingdom of life as the field of his endeavour, and this newer period of compulsory specialism, with its exact methods and its instruments of precision. He was the last of the master anatomists; his range of study extended from protozoa to mankind. He was more than a biologist: he drank deeply at the wells of general knowledge and of humanity. Thirty years have not altered the value of his intellectual coinage; he flooded the scientific and public markets of his time with the fortune of his mind, and the money he passed into circulation still rings true.

After Huxley's death, in the summer of 1895, various lectureships were founded in his memory, one being in the University of Birmingham. He had special ties with the capital of the Midlands his father and mother were Midlanders; he was born of generations which had lived in the centre of England; he was a scion sprung from the very heart of the English stock. In his own body and brain were condensed all the problems relating to the origin and racial affinities of the English people. Hence, when I had the honour of giving the Huxley Lecture ' in Birmingham last year, I chose 'Huxley's Racial Lineage' as my subject and sought to bring all the artillery of modern anthropology to bear on his racial characteristics. Was he Saxon or Celt or a hybrid of the two? Or did there run in his veins blood derived

from some unnamed race? What was his racial composition? I return to this subject again the more willingly because the racial composition of the British people was a matter on which Huxley brought his clear intellect to bear during a brief and busy period of his life. His lucid expositions of our racial problems have never received the attention they deserve, and certainly his opinions have never met with full acceptance on the part of the public. His centenary offers a suitable opportunity for reviewing the conclusions he formed concerning the origin of the British people and of ascertaining how far his opinions have to be modified in the light of recent knowledge.

Let us for a moment, then, treat this great Englishman as an anthropological specimen and, so far as it is now possible, dissect his physical characteristics. He was a tall man, standing quite six feet in height, six inches more than is usual among Midlanders. His frame was spare; his hair was dark brown, almost black. He had his mother's eyes, dark and flashing, and he had his mother's nervous temperament. His complexion was swarthy. As to the size and shape of his head we have no recorded information, but in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons there is a carefully modelled bust, done about 1865, near Huxley's fortieth birthday. From this bust an estimate can be made of the size and shape of his skull and face. His head was massive; I infer that the length of his skull must have been at least 200 millimetres, quite 12 millimetres more than the average for Englishmen ; its width, which was equally great, I infer to have been about 154 millimetres; the width was thus about 77 per cent. of the length-a proportion which prevails in the Midlands and throughout the greater part of these islands. The volume of his brain must have been 1,700 cubic centimetres-at least 220 cubic centimetres or one-seventh more than is given to the average Englishman.

Now the possession of these characters made Huxley an exceptional individual, and they may seem to invalidate any claim to his being of a true Midland lineage. They do not. Long ago Sir Francis Galton, also of Midland birth, discovered that in every herd or community of social animals-be they cattle, dogs or men-a few exceptional individuals are born in each generation. Galton recognised that these exceptional births were Nature's method of securing leaders for herds of cattle and communities of The appearance of a Huxley in a Midland community is but a vindication of Galton's law of leadership. A survey of British skulls of historic and prehistoric dates reveals the presence of these exceptional individuals at all periods. Some modern races are richer than others in the proportion of their exceptional births. Huxley's outstanding characters do not prevent us from

men.

accepting him as a Midlander, nor do they keep us from following his racial lineage to its source.

The shape of head, the colour and texture of skin and hair, are the chief marks on which anthropologists rely in tracing a stranger's racial lineage. When we seek to assign a chance companion to his land and people, and can gain no help from speech, dress, manner or complexion, we fall back in making a diagnosis upon the form and expression of the face. Taking it all in all, the face serves better than any other part of the body as a guide to a man's racial origin. What were Huxley's facial lineaments? His forehead was noteworthy it was broad, flat and vertical, but not lofty. One noticed that it was crossed by a groove or constriction between the eyebrows below, which were but moderately developed, and the frontal bosses above, which were prominent and set well apart, so that the upper transverse margin of the forehead bent sharply under the hair, to become continuous with the rather flattened roof of the skull. These marks are particularly common in the skulls of people who lived in the southern half of England before the period of the Roman occupation and during that period. It is a type of forehead which is not common in English graveyards of the early Saxon period. These features lead us to believe that some, at least, of Huxley's ancestors were in England before the coming of the Romans.

In comparison with the size of his skull, his face was not robustly developed, nor were its features regularly proportioned. The width of his face, if measured on the bare bones, would have been about 132 millimetres-a common dimension in English faces; its length, as measured from the root of the nose to the lower border of the chin, was about 115 millimetres, considerably under the English average. One notices that the upper part of his face, the part on which the nose was set, was short, not more than 65 millimetres-5 millimetres less than the average amount for English faces. His dark eyes were deeply set within ample orbital frames; the upper margins of his orbits were rounded. A well-marked recess or notch separated the root of his nose from the forehead. His nose, which Nature had apparently designed for a massive countenance, had grown somewhat irregularly on the restricted basis of his upper face. A want of harmony in the growth of the hard and soft parts of the nose is not uncommon in Western Europe, and particularly in the western parts of the British Isles. In Huxley's case the soft parts of the nose-the wings and point—were overgrown and prominent. In shape his nose was neither Roman, Greek nor Semitic. The shortness of the upper face and the width from jowl to jowl gave Huxley's face a rather squarish outline. His chin was not deep, nor was it

shelf-like and prominent, as is so often the case in British faces, but it formed a moderately developed oval eminence. His lips were mobile, his mouth ample, and its expression resolute. His beard, when he grew one, had an auburn tint; his swarthiness masked a ruddy tint.

Such were the lineaments of this great Midlander. To what race or breed of mankind did he belong? Let us listen first to the diagnosis made by Sir William Burnett, a Scotsman with a long experience of young men recruited from all parts of the kingdom. He was Director-General of the Medical Service of the Navy in 1846, when Huxley, who had just completed his medical studies and was then barely twenty-one years of age, called at Somerset House with a view to becoming a naval surgeon, with the hope of opportunities for zoological research. Huxley has given an account of this visit :

He [Sir William Burnett] was a tall, shrewd-looking old gentleman, with a broad Scotch accent. I think I see him now as he entered with my card in his hand. The first thing he did was to return it, with the frugal reminder that I should probably find it useful on some other occasion. The second was to ask whether I was an Irishman.1

Huxley hastened to assure the Director-General that he 'was English to the backbone,' but we must not underestimate the old gentleman's anthropological acumen. Tall men with spare frames, dark hair, swarthy skins, deeply set eyes and turned-up noses are particularly common in Ireland. The interest for us is that Huxley, a thoroughbred Englishman, was mistaken by an experienced observer for an Irish Celt.

Let us compare this opinion of Huxley's racial origin with that which he formed of himself. In 1890, when he was sixty-five years of age and had retired to Eastbourne, he contributed to The Nineteenth Century an article on The Aryan Question.' In this paper he gave his final judgment concerning the anthropology of Europe and the racial composition of the British people. He held that only two racial stocks were represented on the Continent the fair, or Nordic, stock of the North, which he named Xanthochroi, and the swarthy Mediterranean stock of the South, which he named the Melanochroi. The inhabitants of the British Isles, he maintained, had been recruited from these two stocks, and from no others. As for himself, he held that he was neither pure Nordic nor pure Mediterranean, but a mixture of the two. The combination of swarthiness,' he wrote, 'with stature above the average and a long skull, confers on me the serene impartiality of a mongrel.' Thus we see that, while Sir William Burnett regarded Huxley as having the external appearance of an Irish Celt, his own diagnosis was that he represented a blend of the two 1 Life and Letters, by Leonard Huxley, vol. i., p. 23.