The inability of the white man to adapt himself to the coloured man's country was one of many interesting points explained by Dr. Leonard Williams, recently, in the first of two lectures at the Royal Institution, London, on The physical and physiological foundations of character."
Character, Dr. Williams defined as conduct so frequently repeated as to become automatic. Different climates determine different people. Those who inhabit a country where the mountains run down io the sea are superstitious, imaginative, and realize how infinitesimal any man is in the ultimate scheme of things. Mountain people are short, and so are their animals, as may be seen in the Shetland, Devon, and Welsh ponies.
The lecturer explained! how the deleterious effect of the solar spectrum at a certain angle on human beings is counteracted by pigment. India shows a varying degree of pigment in its inhabitants, and accompanying this difference is a marked difference also in character and characteristics. It is probable that this pigmentary adaptation is very costly in the matter of energy. The more darkly pigmented a race is the more surely does it lag behind in the progress of civilization. This probably means that the energy necessary to the development of colour is so considerable as to deprive other parts of the organization of its fair share of that energy, and that those parts, which are almost certainly nervous are unable to develop beyond the merest animal needs of continued existence.
"Tt is not difficult," said Dr. Williams, "to understand the white man's superiority over his darker brother and his ability to develop his nervous system in a degree impossible to his dusky fellow; but he pays a high price in tropical diseases in respect of his fair skin. On the other hand, the energy cxpended on the skin in pigment protects against diseases peculiar to the tropics, "When Kipling invited us to take up the white man's burden, I do not think," said the lecturer, thay he understood the full and almost intolerable weight of that burden. Bluntly stated, the conclusion to which we are driven by this consideration is that the white man is not by nature adapted, and therefore is unable by art to adapt himself to the coloured man's country.
"The British are great colonizers. His white skin has given him a reserve of energy which has lured him to the furthest ends of the world by service and sacrifice, he hopes to establish himself and his British civilization; but all his service and sacrifice are destined to ultimate defeat by the very economic forces which, owing to his ignorance of them, he has failed to recognize. His white skin is at once his glory and his undoing. It confers on him a nervous system that makes him a commander, but at the same time gives him a handicap that he can never overcome.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.