Why There Are No Pure Races.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 4 December 1914, Page 4

Why There Are No Pure Races.

The okl idea was. that a race gained in vigour by its purity of strain, says Dr. Woods Hutchinson. This is a delusion, and the purer a race strain is the less vigorous the members of the race will be. There is no such thing as a pure race. Every race on the face of the earth has been mixing with others •■: for thousands of years. The mixing of races adds to vigour, provided, of course, the two strains have good blood. There is no such thing as an "older race." We in Britain are as old as any people in the world, only under a different environment. Mixing of races is going on as constantly all over the world, but more particularly in the newer countries. The regions where there is the most mixing of races are the regions that produce the greatest men. There is no known standard of race purity. One race merges with another and is related to it, recently or remotely. The mixing going on in America is being worked out under most favourable circumstances, although at present the type Of lUHnigrant is not so desirable as il was twenty-five years ago. Formerly they received the peoples of Northern Europe, but now they are getting- them mostly from the southern countries, where the intelligence is not so high. But there is nothing to complain of, because, on the .vht^e, the immigrants are good. The immigrant to any country, as • rule, is an enterprising person rvith plenty of courage and determination, and as these are very good luaiities, there is nothing to fear :rom the influx of foreigners. Never before has the human family had such, a splendid - t opportunity of mixing to the best advantage. The future race to develop will not differ materially from other races. We may to-day be further advanced in some directions, but the general appearance of the peoples will be about the same. There is not much difference between the various races. If you went into a gymnasium, for instance, where men from all the civilised white races were dressed alike and none of them spoke a word, it would be hard to distinguish the men from England and America from those from France, Germany, or Italy. The clue we have now to the different races is mostly in the clothes and man-ers an" language. An exper-ment carried on recently w^«h school children to determine how the foreign born compared with the native born shows how mar'ced an effect the environment in this country has on immigrants. It was found that the children with the lowest standing in school were foreign born. The next lowest were ' those born of foreign born parents ; the next a/ter them were of parents born in Britain; and the highest were those whose grandparents or great grand-parents were born here.

brick. In Anuradhapura, within a mile of the hotel, there at least five huge dagobas, and the remains of several sm-aller ones. These dagobas are conical in shape, generally with a spire on the top, built of solid brick, and said to contain relics of Buddha and priceless .k'w ps■- ■ Ic-tawanara'.na dagoba. is a typical one, thwujyh not the largest : some figures of Sir Emerson Tennent's will give an idea of its si'/,e :— "It's diameter is MfiOft., and its present height :M0 more, whilst the base covers about eight acres. Even with the facilities which modern invention supplies for economising labour, the building of such a mass would at present occupy 500 bricklayers from six to seven years, and would involve an expenditure of at least a million sterling. The materials are sullicient to raise 8000 houses, each with 20ft. frontage; they would construct a town, the size of Ipswich or Coventry, or form a wall one foot in thickness and ten. feet in height, reaching from London to Edinburgh (or Sydney to Melbourne). The outer surface of these dagobas has crumbled, and they ar(> now covered with trees and undergrowth." The country hereabouts is quite Hat, and the difficulty of an adequate Voter supply was met by the construction of enormous dams, which had to be excavated and walled up. From these the city. was supplied, and the district was irrigated, so that a rich, fertile district, now given up to jungle for lack of a water supply, was two thousand years ago able to support millions of inhabitants. From this water supply, too, came the water for the pokunas, or baths, which are found everywhere. Some of these are a hundred and fifty feet long by fifty broad, a,nd twenty-five (jeet deep, paved with marble, with tiers of