I

Behold, my child, the Nordic man,
And be as like him as you can:
His legs are long, his mind is slow,
His hair is lank and made of tow.

II

And here we have the Alpine race:
Oh! what a broad and brutal face!
His skin is of a dirty yellow.
He is a most unpleasant fellow.

III

The most degraded of them all Mediterranean we call.

His hair is crisp, and even curls, And he is saucy with the girls.

THIS translation is my own. I offer it with diffidence, for I recognize that it does not reproduce the deep organtones of the original. But it gives the substance of that fine poem, and it is only with the substance I mean that description of the Race which it conveys that I have here to deal.

I heard so much about the Nordic Man in these last few months that I was moved to collect recently a great mass of information upon him and to coördinate it. Upon the Alpine Man and the Mediterranean Man I am not so erudite; nor is it indeed to any great that I should be purpose for they are clearly inferior. But the Nordic Man is worth anybody's trouble; and here is what I have found out about him.

He is the Conqueror and the Adventurer. He is the Lawgiver and the essentially Moral Man. He arranges the world as it should be arranged. He

1 From the New Statesman (London Independent weekly), January 17

does everything for his own good and for the good of others. He is a Natural Leader. Even those who hate him fear him; all respect him. The Alpine Man sits sullenly at his feet awaiting his orders; the Mediterranean Man flies in terror from his face.

But it is not enough to learn these general characters in the Nordic Man, pleasing though they are. No sound biologist could be content until he knew something intimate of his origin and habits where he might be found, what he does, and how to tell him at sight.

This, then, is what I have found about the Nordic Man. I have space only for the most salient points, but I hope to complete the picture in detail when I shall have leisure to write my book on the species. It will be fully illustrated, and will have a very complete index.

The Nordic Man is born either in the West End of London or in a pleasant country-house, standing in its own parklike grounds. That is the general rule. He is, however, sometimes born in a parsonage, and rather more frequently in a deanery or a bishop's palace, or a canon's house in a close. Some of this type have been born in North Oxford; but none, that I can discover, in the provincial manufacturingtowns, and certainly none east of Charing Cross or south of the river.

The Nordic Man has a nurse to look after him while he is a baby, and she has another domestic at her service. He has a night and a day nursery, and he is full of amusing little tricks which

endear him to his parents as he grows through babyhood to childhood.

Toward the age of ten or eleven the Nordic Man goes to a preparatory school, the headmaster of which is greatly trusted by the Nordic Man's parents, especially by the Nordic Man's mother. He early learns to Play the Game, and is also grounded in the elements of Good Form, possibly the classics, and even, exceptionally, some modern tongue. He plays football and cricket; usually, but not always, he is taught to swim.

Thence the Nordic Man proceeds to what is called a Public School, where he stays till he is about eighteen. He then goes to either Oxford or Cambridge, or into the Army. He does not stay long in the Army; while from the University he proceeds either to a profession such as the Bar, or writing advertisements or to residence upon his estate. This last he can do only if his father dies early.

The Nordic Man lives in comfort and even luxury through manhood; he shoots, he hunts, he visits the South of France, he plays bridge. He hates the use of scent; he changes into a special kind of clothes every day for dinner. He is extremely particular about shaving, and he wears his hair cut short and even bald. The Nordic Man does not bother much about Religion, so when he approaches death he has to distract himself with some hobby, often that of his health. He dies of all sorts of things, but more and more of the cancer. After his death, his sons, nephews, or cousins take up the rôle of the Nordic Man and perpetuate the long and happy chain.

Such is the life-story of the Nordic Man. I have given it only in its broadest lines, and have left out a great many subsections; but what I have said will be sufficient to indicate places in which he is to be surprised and the kind of things which you will there find him

doing. As for his character, which lies at the root of all this great performance, that is less easily described, for one might as well attempt to describe a color or a smell; but I can give some indications of it.

The Nordic Man dislikes all cruelty to animals, and is himself kind to them in the following scale: first the dog, then the horse, then the cat, then birds, and so on till you get to insects, after which he stops caring. Microbes, oddly enough, he detests. He will treat them in the most callous manner.

In the matter of wine the Nordic Man is divided; you cannot predicate of him that he will drink it, or that if he drinks it he knows what it is. But in the matter of whiskey you may safely say that it is his stand-by, save for a certain subsection of him who dare not touch it. These stand apart and are savage to their fellows.

The Nordic Man is very reserved, save in the matter of speech-making. He hates to betray an emotion, but he hates still more the complete concealment of it. He has therefore established a number of conventions whereby it may be known when he is angry, pleased, or what not; but he has no convention for fear, for he is never afraid. This reminds me that the Nordic Man despises conflict with lethal weapons unless it be against the enemies of his country, but he delights in watching, and will sometimes himself practise, conflict conducted with stuffed gloves. As for fighting with his feet, he would not dream of it; nor does he ever bite.

The Nordic Man is generous, and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be somewhat inferior in rank and wealth. This is a very beautiful trait in the Nordic Man, and causes him to believe that he is everywhere beloved. On the other hand, the Nordic Man prefers to live

with those richer than himself. The Nordic Man detests all ostentation in dress, and detests even more the wearing of cheap clothes. He loves it to be known that his clothes were costly. No Nordic Man wears a made-up tie.

The Nordic Man boasts that he is not addicted to the Arts, and here he is quite right; but he is an excellent collector of work done by the inferior Mediterranean race, and is justly proud of the rare successes of his own people in this field. In the same way the Nordic Man will tell you with emphasis that he cannot write. Herein he tells the truth. Yet, oddly enough, he is convinced that no one has ever been able to write except Nordic Men; and this article of faith he applies particularly to True Poetry, which, he conceives, can only be inspired in his own tongue.

The Nordic Man does everything better than anybody else does it, and himself proclaims this truth unceasingly; but where he particularly shines is in the administration of justice. For he will condemn a man to imprisonment or death with greater rapidity than

will the member of any other race. In giving judgment he is, unlike the rest of the human species, unmoved by any bias of class or blood, let alone of personal interest. On this account his services as a magistrate are sought far and wide throughout the world, and his life is never in danger save from disappointed suitors or those who have some imaginary grievance against him.

The Nordic Man is a great traveler. He climbs mountains; he faces with indifference tropical heat and arctic cold. He is a very fine fellow.

I must conclude by telling you all that I am not obtaining these details from any personal observations, as the part of the country in which I live has very few Nordic Men, and most of them are away during the greater part of the year staying either in the houses of other Nordic Men or in the resorts of pleasure upon the Continent. But I have had the whole thing described to me most carefully by a friend of mine who was for a long time himself a Nordic Man, until he had the misfortune to invest in British Dyes, and he guarantees me the accuracy of his description.

HERE is, for instance, the telescope which Galileo invented, and with which he saw the mountains of the moon, the spots upon the sun, and four of the satellites of Jupiter - an instrument of modest dimensions and momentous history. A few days ago I saw also his birthplace in Pisa, without the memorial marble attributed to it by the guidebooks; and the lamp in the Cathedral which he watched, timing it by his pulse, and thus discovering the principle of the equal times of the vibrations of any pendulum. Torricelli's glass tubes, to be seen here, have also made scientific history; and so have the early dissections of the Italian anatomists. To speak of art would be outside my province, though there is science no less than art in the dome of Brunelleschi, and in Giotto's towers as well, and Leonardo da Vinci was as great a man of science as an artist. Through past weeks I have been overwhelmed, not for the first time by any means, with a sense of the stupendous greatness of these Italians, and if one recalls the Roman Forum it is necessary to admit that the ancient Romans were Italians also, like Dante and Michelangelo and Galileo, and Signor Marconi.

In New York State I have also visited another city called Rome, which is inhabited mostly by Italians. But this race is not particularly welcome in the United States nowadays. Its members make roads, 'shine' one's boots in the streets, or sell fruit or run ice-cream

1 From the New Statesman (London Independent weekly), January 24

parlors. If a young Galileo were born in Pisa now and wished to avail himself of the opportunities for research afforded by the Yerkes or the Mount Wilson telescopes, he would find it almost impossible to enter the country which, by the way, was discovered by Italian sailors; and if he did manage to include himself in the very small quota permitted by the present Immigration Law, he would find himself called, by the dominant race in North America, a Dago, meaning an inferior creature, possibly useful for making roads or polishing American shoes—or telescopic lenses.

The descendants if they are the descendants, as to which we must inquire of the great races of antiquity and the Renaissance, men with names and faces which recall ancient Greece and Rome and the birth of the modern world in Italy and Spain, will learn in America, and also in certain quarters in England, that the one really great race of mankind is notably dissimilar to any of theirs. This great race is tall and large and blond. Its name is Nordic. The Mediterranean sea, to say nothing of Galilee, and the men bred on those shores, are nought, we are told, compared with the dominant, preappointed masters of the earth, whom Nietzsche described as 'great blond beasts,' and to whom the allusion is evident when we are told that, requiring some great deed to be done, 'God sends one of his Englishmen.'

But nothing moves in the modern world, said a great student in the nineteenth century, that is not Greek in

origin, and if we modify the statement so as to include the Semitic origin of our religion, and the Italian rebirth of science and art, we must admit that without these beginners and begetters we should be nowhere and nothing. There would be no Metropolitan Museum or Woolworth Building in New York, nor any New York at all; nor even any old York. The historical facts are beyond question. We owe to these peoples all that we have and are; yet to-day their present representatives are practically excluded from the most powerful, wealthy, and progressive country in the world on the implicit ground, whatever may be outwardly asserted, that they are inferior and undesirable recruits to the ranks of American citizenship.

What is the truth? Are the Americans, who name themselves after Amerigo Vespucci, right in their view of present people who bear such names as his? Statistical observations, based upon the approved methods of estimating intelligence, are now before us, according to which the child of Southern Italian stock, as seen in the schools of the United States, is approximately in the same intellectual class as the Negro. Is that true? And if modern Italians are an inferior people, what are the causes of so great a decadence from antiquity and the Renaissance? And if the hope of mankind is the Nordic race, what is the evidence as to the past achievements of that race, upon which our hopes for the future must be based?

we call anthropology. How can this science be other than in embryo? It is obviously the highest and most complex department of biology, which is itself little more than just begun. Despite Lamarck and Darwin, and their forerunners and successors, we are only at the beginning of the comprehension of the laws of heredity and variation and adaptation - even if we confine our study to, for instance, such relatively simple creatures as bacteria. And if we knew thoroughly the physical facts, in respect of bacilli or amœbæ, we should yet be some way from understanding the extent and manner of the influence of the psychological factors peculiar to man, who can learn and create as other creatures cannot. Yet, despite our abysmal ignorance of the factors which determine the physical and psychical characteristics of our species, there are always an abundance of quacks to lay down the law, and a superabundance of fools and knaves to believe them. Ad hoc anthropology is the order of the day well discussed by M. Jean Finot in his volume on Race Prejudice. It is to be found in popular articles and in the learned contributions to the International Eugenics Congress held in New York in 1921. Serious people talk of race in our modern world as if any such thing as a pure race were really to be found, and as if they could define what they mean by a pure race at all. While genuine students, like Sir Arthur Kester, begin slowly to guess how the influence of diet and light, for instance, upon the ductless glands and their balance may determine such anthropological criteria as the length of the limbs and the shape of the head and jaws, the quacks continue to assert anything they please, as if we were still in the age of Gobineau. There may be a thousand natural reasons why we dislike this or that type of human being

the commonest being that he works