Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/102

people the world over, the strong tendency is toward the unification of all the races, and the outcome in time will be complete amalgamation, and but a single, homogeneous species of men will inhabit the earth. A few thousand years, fifteen or twenty, for instance, will be sufficient to effect this, while in the meantime many of the remnants of races still in existence will die out, others will become extinct in time, and war, inter-marriage, the struggle for existence, and extermination will do the rest. Thousands of such changes have taken place in nature already, requiring an untold number of years, so the unification of the human race would be but a bagatelle as compared with similar developments that have taken place on the globe in past time. In this connection, consider for a moment the evolution in that pedigree of now extinct animals that finally resulted in the production of the modern horse, — the earliest known ancestor of which was no bigger than a fox. Man's career is surely tending toward unification for the very reasons I have given above, and it is only through what can be accomplished by artificial selection that we have remarkable and distinct species resulting, as in the case of domestic dogs and pigeons. Many of the forms of either of these would be considered as belonging to distinct genera, and perhaps even distinct subfamilies, were we to meet with them in the wild state. . Surely no mammalogist of the school representing the biological division of the United States Department of Agriculture, would for a moment think of retaining a Scotch greyhound and a hairless dog of Mexico in the same genus, were they to encounter those two species in a ferine state. Both of them belong to the Canidæ, of course, but I warrant