Nell began reading as soon as I set the pot and cups down on the trunk. On the first pages Helen declared Western civilization’s lack of understanding of other peoples’ customs to be the world’s greatest and gravest social problem. By page twenty she had brought in Copernicus, Dewey, Darwin, Rousseau, and Linnaeus’ Homo ferus, swept around the globe a few times, and asserted that the notion of racial heredity, of a pure race, is bunk, that culture is not biologically transmitted, and that Western civilization is not the end result of an evolution of culture, nor is the study of primitive
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