by Robert H. Lowie
American Anthropologist
Vol. 25, No. 3
July-September, 1923
Robert Lowie, Kroeber’s colleague at Berkeley, was the more devoted disciple of Boas. On various occasions during his career he was engaged in professional polemics to defend Boas’s views. While still in New York, he contributed to the evolving anti-racist school. But like Kroeber, once he moved to the West Coast, he kept his racial egalitarianism mostly out of the political arena. Similar to other Boasnians, Lowie’s background was Jewish-German: he came from Vienna, which from a New York perspective was close enough. His upbringing was not unlike Kroeber’s either. Following education in New York public schools, he came to Columbia only at the graduate stage, where in a very unsystematic way, intertwined with work at the American Museum, he became an ethnographer. Much of his work was done in the field, and in various memoirs he regretted his own lack of theoretical preparation for some of his general books, primarily his commercially most successful work, Primitive Society. For fifteen years before 1921 Lowie worked at the Museum under Clark Wissler: none the less he remained a Boasian, interacting with anthropologists such as Alexander Goldenweiser, Paul Radin, Leslie Spier, and Elsie Clews Parsons. It was this cultural context that was so important in the formulation of his egalitarian views.Foraging societies are often said by cultural anthropologists to be "egalitarian," so this looks like a hopeful place for feminist matriarchalists to begin. However, anthropologists mean something by the term egalitarianism that turns out, oddly enough, to be compatible with the most virulent misogyny and sexism. Egalitarian societies are defined by anthropologists as small groups which lack any elaborate political hierarchy. Individuals are free to come and go as they please; they have immediate access to resources and can exert influence over other individuals in their group. There are pecking orders in egalitarian societies, but they depend "more upon personal qualities and skills than upon inherited wealth or status at birth." But among the "personal qualities" most frequently used to determine status in so-called egalitarian societies are "age, sex, and personal characteristics." Now age and sex are not earned. An individual's age changes, inexorably, and in this sense can be regarded as a kind of achieved status. But this is not so for sex, which is "ascribed for life." Thus arises the irony of speaking of societies which systematically discriminate against one sex in preference to the other as "egalitarian." [43] Such discrimination can be relatively minor, as it is among the Mbuti and San of Africa, where men are slightly more likely to participate in collective decision-making, but there are also many glaring examples of male authority, dominance, and disproportionate prestige in foraging societies. Even in societies that lack class systems or political leadership, one can find fathers giving away their daughters, husbands beating their wives or having legitimate control over them sexually, men raping women without penalty, and men claiming a monopoly on the most significant forms of ritual power. [44]
-- The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future, by Cynthia Eller
[Lowie, Robert H. Lowie, Ethnologist. A Personal Record (Berkeley: California University Press, 1959). Robert F. Murphy, Robert H. Lowie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). Cora Du Bois, Lowie’s Selected Papers in Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). For a straightforward criticism of racism by Lowie, especially on Madison Grant and H.F. Osborn, see his “Psychology, Anthropology and Race,” American Anthropologist, 25 (1923), 291-303.)]
In New York the Boasians and the racists competed for influence, while sharing similar institutional space. At the same time as the rest in the anthropology community were shifting professional alliances in an ad-hoc manner, the Boasians were gaining strength, until in the mid-twenties they became the dominant force, controlling the politics of the discipline by sheer numbers. By then, the younger generation of Boasians was coming of age. But before examining their impact, there is a need to chart the developments during the earlier period in physical anthropology, which was the professional locus for studies of race.
American Physical Anthropology
A brief survey of American anthropology at the end of World War I shows that little mattered outside the East Coast. Although there were departments of anthropology in other parts of the country such as Chicago and San Francisco, and though the anatomist Wingate Todd at Case Western Reserve worked on physical anthropology, the undisputed center was in the East. Distance prevented anthropologists outside of Boston, New York and Washington from participating in professional activity. Committee membership particularly illustrates this phenomenon. In the capital, an active local anthropological society together with the Smithsonian Institution partially compensated for the lack of a major university center. Washington’s prime was before World War I, but it remained active during the interwar years. Harvard’s anthropology department together with its affiliated Peabody Museum was second only to New York in significance for the profession. During most of this period, Ronald Dixon, Alfred Tozzer, and Earnest Hooton were Harvard’s leading anthropologists. While certainly very different from each other, they maintained the façade of a team. The distance from New York meant that the Harvard anthropologists could profess partial unity based upon geography, at the same time it was not too far for Harvard to be secluded from the centers of power.
As the intellectual center of the country, New York attracted several active anthropological institutions, with close contacts to major philanthropic sources. The Galton Society and Cold Spring Harbor were the centers for the eugenicists and racists, while the New School for Social Research provided a liberal outlet for the Columbia faculty. Both the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University were the core of anthropological activity and employed anthropologists of liberal and conservative commitments. Despite the ideological diversity, there was contact, at times close, between the opposing camps. The interaction resulted partly from institutional constraints, and partly from association with a larger anthropological community that included many neutrals. Surrounded by, and being part of, the intellectual activity of the city, New York anthropologists were, generally speaking, much more involved in public debates and retreated far less into the ivory tower. Columbia’s anthropology was synonymous with Boas, but he was the exception and many faculty members kept close contacts with eugenics circles. A comparable situation existed in the American Museum where the liberal and conservative groups worked together, though not in cooperation. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the President of the Museum was a close associate of Madison Grant and an adamant Anglo-Saxon supremacist. Nevertheless Boas worked in the Museum for several years, as did Robert Lowie, and later Harry Shapiro and Margaret Mead. The tension and rivalry made a non-partisan approach difficult, and therefore neutrality was not as much a determining force in New York, as it was in Washington and Cambridge.
-- The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars, by Elazar Barkan
WHEN scientists ceased to quote farmers' tales about the cleverness of their horses or dogs and devised laboratory experiments for the testing of animal behavior, a new era began to dawn in the history of psychology. Psychologists are laying aside the anecdotal method in the evaluation of individual and racial worth, and every anthropologist will welcome an improvement in technique that promises to shed light on one of the most obscure of his own problems, the question of the interrelationship of empirically observed achievement and innate capacity. Unfortunately the psychologists who are most prominently associated with anthropological applications of their new tool are so ignorant of anthropology that their results are worthless. It may be said on their behalf that they have been misled by anthropologists, that we ourselves have been guilty of spreading erroneous conceptions, but that only makes matters worse. The situation thus justifies an elementary consideration of the points at issue, a review that shall dispel the farrago of bad logic, bad biology, and bad faith that continues to pervade discussion of racial endowment.
ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND HEREDITY
In the first place, it may be well to repudiate some absurd misconceptions, such as the strange notion that certain anthropologists favor an extravagant influence of environmental as contrasted with hereditary factors; and that they teach the absolute equality of all races, nay of all individuals. I do not of course pretend to know the views of all living anthropologists, but I am not acquainted with any colleague who entertains these doctrines. Professor Boas is commonly mentioned as the champion of such dogmas. When, however, I turn from the garbled account of his conclusions in such works as Mr. Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race to his own statements, I find nothing to support such misrepresentation. Professor Boas argues for "a strictly limited plasticity" (zugunsten einer eng begrenzten Plastizitat) under the influence of an altered environment.1 On the subject of heredity he has this to say:
Although we have seen that environment, particularly domestication, has a far-reaching influence upon the bodily form of the races of man, these influences are of a quite secondary character when compared to the far-reaching influence of heredity. Even granting the greatest possible amount of influence to environment, it is readily seen that all the essential traits of man are due primarily to heredity. . . . I am inclined to believe that the influence of environment is of such a character, that, although the same race may assume a different type when removed from one environment to another, it will revert to its old type when replaced in its old environment.2
Finally his statement as to the comparative mental make-up of Caucasians and Negroes is extremely cautious; he accepts the possibility of differences but is not convinced of such differences as would incapacitate the Negro for the exigencies of modern life.3
Personally, I take great pains to impress upon my students that the innate equality of all races is an unproved dogma, in spite of the fact that all the demonstrations of inequality hitherto attempted are scientifically worthless. Some time ago I formulated my views in the following words:
As to the existence of superior races, I am an agnostic open to conviction. All evolutionists admit that at some point an organic change of fundamental significance occurred. It is conceivable that the Bushmen and Negrito, Pygmies and Negroes are organically below the remainder of living human types, and that differences of one sort or another even divide more closely related stocks. But between what is conceivable and what is definitely established there yawns a chasm, and where the scientist has no proof he holds no dogmas, though dispassionately he may frame tentative hypotheses.
This is not a very subtle point, but seems to transcend the comprehension of some writers. One of them has even gone so far as to accuse me of denying innate individual differences, referring his readers to certain articles of mine that were expressly designed to illustrate these differences.
It is an interesting fact that those who most vociferously accuse anthropologists of underestimating heredity as compared with environment are themselves the worst offenders in this regard. How does President Osborn, for example, account for the differences of cro-Magnon man in the Aurignacian and in the Magdalenian period? By the influence of environment! He writes as follows:
It is probable that in the genial climate of the Riviera these men obtained their finest development; the country was admirably protected from the cold winds of the north, refuges were abundant, and game by no means scarce to judge from the quantity of animal bones found in the caves.4
In the reduction of the stature of the woman to 5 feet 1 inch and of the man to 5 feet 3 inches; and in the reduction of the brain capacity to 1,500 c.cm., we may be witnessing the result of exposure to very severe climatic conditions in a race which retained its fine physical and mental characteristics only under the more genial climatic conditions of the south.5
This is environmentalism with a vengeance! One wonders why those who so readily account for a difference of 300 c.cm. in brain capacity and of 10 inches in stature by a change in geographical conditions refuse to admit that skulls may become somewhat narrower or wider under the influence of changed conditions. The difference of 10 inches in average height is about twice as great as the difference between the Scotch and the South Italians; it is greater than the difference between Andamanese pygmies and Frenchmen; equivalent to the difference between the Nilotics and the Vedda! What does Dr. Osborn mean? Does he believe that a climatic change effected a change in the germ-plasm tantamount to a heritable mutation? Or is he merely suggesting a "modification" in Baur's sense of the term? Even on the latter assumption, he is pleading for a potency of the environment that far transcends Boas's notion of a "strictly limited plasticity."
Mr. Madison Grant is not less of an environmentalist than his scientific sponsor, but apparently he attributes precisely the opposite effects to the same climatic conditions. The Nordics, whom in the particular sections of the book I am now quoting from6 he is pleased to favor, are said to have developed through isolation and the selection due to the rigors of severe winters, while under "the softening influence of a life of ease and plenty" they succumb.7 Genial climate was necessary for the Cro-Magnons, the alleged spiritual forerunners of the Nordics, but a genial climate spells disaster for the Nordics, it seems.
Mr. Grant, however, not merely ascribes considerable influence to the environment when it so pleases him, but also implicitly denies the combined influence of both heredity and environment when the spirit so moves him. It is indeed one of his explicit cardinal doctrines that racial traits are "to all intents and purposes immutable," "fixed and rigid." He furthermore holds that in Sweden "there has been but a single racial type from the beginning" and once he even delivers himself of the statement that "Denmark, Norway and Sweden are purely Nordic."8 Now we must recall that according to this author the Nordics evolved and actually flourish in the climatic conditions characteristic of their present habitation. Nevertheless he concludes a paragraph on the Scandinavian countries with this statement: "To-day all three seem to be intellectually anaemic."9
As a member of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study and of the Scandinavian Club of the University of California, I venture to stigmatize this proposition as arrant nonsense. But apart from the crass ignorance it displays of the intellectual life of the peoples lampooned, how is such degeneration intelligible on Mr. Grant's own principles? If the Nordics are by heredity a favored race; if the Scandinavians are pure Nordics; if they "flourish, do their work and raise their families"10 in precisely the type of habitat they occupy; if racial traits "do not change during the lifetime of a language or an empire";11 then, by what magical process, neither racial nor environmental, do these purest Nordics degenerate to a status of intellectual anaemia within a few brief centuries? Perhaps Mr. Grant is not, after all, the champion of heredity he professes to be when it suits his convenience.
Before leaving this writer, I will call attention to two sentences in immediate contact with each other in his chapter on "The Expansion of the Nordics." In the first, already quoted, the three Scandinavian countries are described as "purely Nordic." In the second, we are told that in southwestern Norway and in Denmark "there is a substantial number of short, dark round heads of Alpine affinities."12 Comment is superfluous.
To sum up, it is not the professional anthropologist, but the professional heredity-monger that disregards the influence of heredity ad libitum. The anthropologist does not assert that the environment induces far-reaching effects on the germ-plasm: he merely asserts that certain phenomena change independently of the germ-plasm and in this claim he is fully supported by the attitude of Professor Elliot Smith, one of the few scientists with primarily biological orientation who have not disdained to try to understand the meaning of culture.13
INNATE ABILITY AND CULTURE
In the past, arguments on racial differences have almost always been advanced on the assumption that observed differences in cultural achievement must be the expression of correlated differences in inborn capacity. In one sense no one denies this; everyone would admit that a cat, a dog or a monkey is incapable of producing or sharing in human culture. The point at issue is, whether when the organization adequate to the production of culture, or, let us say, of the culture characteristic of the Upper Palaeolithic was reached, any further cultural advance was conditioned by equivalent changes in inborn equipment. The differences between the material culture of, say, the West African Negro or the Shoshoni of Idaho on the one hand and Western civilization on the other are so striking that most writers naively assume that they are patent proofs of organic differences, and popular prejudice doubtless rests on the same fallacy.
The argument is fallacious, in spite of its plausibility, for the following reason. When we study the known history of culture, we find great changes without any corresponding changes in racial constitution. In 1850 no one dreamt of crediting the Germans or the Japanese people with efficiency. Elizabethan England was very different from the England of Queen Anne's day; and those who talk as though an aversion to discussions of sex were a deep-rooted Anglo-Saxon trait have perhaps slight acquaintance with Fielding and the Restoration dramatists. It is true that Galton asserted a racial cause for the magnificence and the decline of Athenian culture, but his claim is an empty allegation and contradictory to his own interpretation of the Renaissance.
The instances hitherto cited involve, however, relatively slight differences when viewed in broadest perspective. Hence it seems desirable to supplement them by others. It is not merely admitted but contended that the Nordic race has not changed in inborn equipment for several thousand years except in so far as it has been debased by amalgamation with inferior types. Yet the culture of the Nordics has developed extraordinarily within the space of from two to three thousand years. The Cro-Magnons provide an even better illustration. They appeared about, say, 25,000 B.C. and persisted through Magdalenian times, which began about 16,000 B.C.14 Here we have a race at least originally superior in inborn capacity to any now living, yet in 9,000 years or more they cannot rise above the level of the Stone Age culturally! Nay, the case is still more curious, for it is the decadent Cro-Magnons -- short and with reduced brain capacity -- who achieve the triumphs of Palaeolithic art!
Culture evidently does not vary with race according to any simple formula of functional relationship. This does not prove that the Tasmanians or Bushmen or Andamanese had the inborn capacity to develop unaided the civilization of Western Europe. It does prove that the difference of their culture from ours is not necessarily rooted in any innate difference, that the popular argument is wholly inconclusive. We simply do not know whether the evolution of Homo sapiens involved all the organic requirements for any type of culture known, or whether certain deficiencies, as yet undefinable, necessarily bar certain varieties of the species from independently attaining such and such a cultural status.
Since, then, the gross comparison of cultural achievement leads nowhere, so far as the determination of innate possibilities goes, let us turn for aid to the psychologist. Here, too, however, certain elementary precautions are prerequisite.
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
A comparison of distinct groups involves the consideration of both average values and variability. It is entirely conceivable that two groups should coincide in their average mentality but differ in range, so that one may produce far more remarkable individuals in both positive and negative direction than the other. Professor Fischer, for example, suggests that the Caucasian differs from the Negroid in precisely this point, while not excelling him in average intelligence. If this could be established, it would have far-reaching theoretical and practical bearings: it would account for the differences in cultural achievement without assuming that the average level of intelligence varies in different cultures; and it would imply that for the ordinary tasks of life the Negroid is as well fitted as the average white.
In connection with the occurrence of extreme positive variations it is well to bear in mind another point forcibly made by Father Wilhelm Schmidt. Extreme deviations from the norm naturally occur with greater frequency in large populations than in communities of several hundred. A class of fifty may have the average stature of the whole student body, but it is not so likely to have as tall members as occur in the total campus population of, say, ten thousand. It is not astonishing, then, that hordes of Andamanese or Australians numbering not over a hundred or two should never have produced the personalities which figure in the history of China, India, and Western countries.
Another caution "is of tremendous importance. Since we are interested in establishing the existence or nonexistence of innate differences, the influence of training and other noncongenital factors, all of which for convenience sake we may call environmental, must be eliminated. The light-heartedness, not to say unscrupulousness, of many writers on this point is appalling. Admitting, as they must, that an empirical test cannot eliminate the environmental factor, they decree that certain observed differences are too great to be explained by environmental differences, hence are evidence of hereditary differences. The illegitimacy of this reasoning is apparent as soon as it is couched in clear language. Letting H and E represent hereditary and environmental determinants, respectively, the empirical results may be formulated as follows:
H1+E1=A H2+E2=A ±m
It does not require a profound knowledge of mathematics to see that the difference ± m proves nothing as to the value of H 1 and H2 so long as El and E2 differ by an unknown quantity. This is not academic logic-chopping pure and simple: we are told that Negroes are inferior to Caucasians because in certain tests 79 per cent of the former fell below C as against 25 per cent of Caucasians while only 1 per cent of the Negroes as against 12 per cent of the Caucasians scored above C. This difference, we are told, is too great to be interpreted as the result of educational and other social differences. But New York Negroes practically equal Alabama Whites in the tests! Hence the environmental factor must be taken into account, and unless we devise accurate methods for its quantitative determination, let us hold our tongues concerning inborn differences.
RACIAL AND NATIONAL GROUPS
It is a commonplace of modern science that racial and national groups rarely coincide. This has not deterred several prominent psychologists from blandly grouping immigrants into the United States according to their place of origin and then proclaiming that the results of the ensuing group tests are racial statistics. This is the well-nigh incredible procedure of Dr. Robert M. Yerkes in an article on "Testing the Human Mind," contributed to The Atlantic Monthly for March, 1923. Dr. Yerkes not only brushes aside in cavalier fashion the educational differences discussed in the preceding paragraphs but cites tests on Italians, Poles, Turks, Greeks, et al. as establishing racial differences. He also ingeniously suggests that the Mediterranean element accounts for the low scores of recent immigrant groups; that element apparently possesses the miraculous quality of detracting from the Italian average by its presence and from the Polish average by its absence.
I wonder what would be thought of a naturalist who should wish to ascertain the characteristic weight of pure breeds of dogs by averaging an odd assortment of St. Bernards, dachshunds, and bulldogs and comparing the result with a corresponding average for mastiffs, fox terriers, and German police dogs. As a humble exercise in arithmetic the procedure may be justified, but its biological significance would be nil. Yet it would be better than Dr. Yerkes's method, for at least the naturalist would know precisely how many individuals of each breed he had weighed, but when Dr. Yerkes tests "Italians" he does not know how many of them represent each of the relatively pure types whose inborn endowments he is attempting to ascertain.
At this point I must register an emphatic protest against the naive assumption that because certain individuals in a region in which mixture of types has demonstrably occurred display physical features characteristic of type A they are therefore likewise the possessors of the mental traits that are ex hypothesi distinctive of the primeval "pure" type A. President Osborn goes further and lays down the proposition that even when one of the most typical traits of the Nordic, blondness, is lacking the individual may still be "three-fourths or seven-eighths Nordic, because it only requires a single dark-eyed ancestor to lend the dark hair and eye color to an otherwise pure Nordic strain."15 By implication dark hair and eye color will be the only features to dominate and the psychological traits of courage, loyalty, self-sacrifice and idealism innate in the Nordic will remain dominant in miscegenation. There is of course not a shred of evidence in support of such a principle of inheritance. One might well despair of modern biology if such slovenly pronunciamentos were not rejected by sane students of the subject. As Doctors East and Jones point out, we must be
very cautious about drawing genetic conclusions in the human race based upon the possession of particular traits, in the absence of proof of a long-continued isolation. . . . Traits originally characteristic of certain peoples because of isolation and the consequent inbreeding have been shifted back and forth, combined and recombined. . . . It is wholly possible, for example, that a tall, blue-eyed, dolichocephalic Frenchman really possesses less of the so-called Nordic factors than a short, dark-eyed round-head.16
Two other points may well be emphasized in this context. For one thing, the variability of "pure" types is largely unknown; we do not know, for example, how probable it is for a "pure" Alpine to vary so much from the norm of his type as to appear like a typical "pure" Nordic. Secondly, it is about time for writers on European anthropology to realize that things are more complicated than a hasty perusal of Ripley's book, now twenty years old, may indicate. Apart from the Adriatic or Dinaric race recognized by many investigators, we may have other types to consider if Dr. Czekanowski and other anthropologists are correct in their observations in Poland and Russia.17
PROGRAM
Is it, then, necessary to abandon all hope of progress in this field? By no means: a calm survey of the difficulties merely leads to a formulation that does not by necessity produce absurd and worthless results. We cannot hope to eliminate all disturbing factors, but that is equally true even of such ancient sciences as astronomy. We can at least get rid of certain conditions that are bound to vitiate comparative results.
First of all we must choose a region that is anthropologically well known and which has been demonstrably occupied by more than one racial strain, but in which strains are locally more or less segregated. Without assuming that it is the only country suitable for the purpose, I venture to suggest that Italy provides a very favorable starting-point. The contrast between the North Italian Alpine type and the South Italian Mediterranean type is notorious. While of course minor variations are not lacking in the south, the uniformity of the South Italian population is remarkable.18 The hair is almost always black; the nasal index for Abruzzi, Campania, Puglie, and Sardinia is 69.77,69.68,69.49, and 68.82, respectively; the stature ranges provincially between the narrow limits of 159.9 cm. for Basilicata to 162 cm. for Campania; "mixed brown" pigmentation occurs in at least half of the individuals examined, rising to 62.2 per cent in Calabria and 70.4 per cent in Sardinia. When we consider, on the other hand, such typical North Italians as the Piedmontese and Venetians' we discover that the hair is often, if not almost always, of chestnut color; that the mean height is distinctly greater than among the Mediterraneans -- 166. 3 against 163.7 cm.; that there is an appreciable percentage of individuals with fair pigmentation. In addition there is the marked difference in head form: the Piedmontese with an index of 85.7 and the Venetians with an index of 85 are markedly brachycephalic; the South Italians while, contrary to current statements not dolichocephalic at present, are either mesocephalic or merely of moderately brachycephalic character. Nevertheless, when we compare the head form of the several South Italian provinces, the impression of homogeneity so strongly suggested by other physical traits disappears; between the extremes represented by Sardinia with 77.5 and Campania with 82.1 there are intermediate figures, such as 78.4 for Calabria and 80.8 for Basilicata.
These data furnish us with the possibility of sketching a program for psychological investigation. In the first place, it is probably not difficult to minimize the environmental factors: a thousand illiterate peasants from Sardinia will probably not differ notably in their cultural influences from an equal number of illiterate peasants from Sicily. Secondly, when we find such regional differences in head form within an otherwise uniform population, they can plausibly be accounted for through racial mixture; specifically, the relatively broad-skulled groups are presumably such through the influence of Alpine mixture. The alleged innate mental differences are accordingly amenable to empirical verification or disproof: the Calabrians with an index of 78.4 may be assumed to be more like the Basilicatans (SO.8) than like the people from Abruzzi (81.9) and Campania (82.1); the Sicilians (79.6) will be more like the Apulians (79.8) than like the other groups mentioned. I am well aware of the fact that very small differences, possibly derived from small series, may not be significant. It is also obvious that, with the variety of complicating factors, the ideal of quantitative refinement here outlined cannot be realized. Nevertheless, if there is anything in the alleged mental difference of the Alpine and Mediterranean types, the repeated comparison of all the otherwise homogeneous Mediterranean groups differing only by a varying degree of Alpine admixture indicated by the cephalic index should constitute a crucial test. In Sardinia, with its excessively dark pigmentation, relatively greatest degree of dolichocephaly among the living (77.5), genuine dolichocephaly (71.53) of cranial material, and maximum trend toward curly hair and prognathism, an especially favorable opportunity presents itself for ascertaining the psychological influence of the Negroid strain that has plausibly been assumed as the factor determining these deviations from the South Italian norm. In the north, the aberrant case of Liguria, where the index of 79.34 stands out in marked contrast with that of the neighboring brachycephalic provinces, corresponding comparative tests seem desirable.
While I have stressed the cephalic index in view of Italian conditions, I should not like to be interpreted as disregarding other physical traits. In Portugal, for example, it may well be that the regional distribution of blondness would provide a better line of cleavage than the character of the head form.
A sane procedure will involve the systematic exploitation of minimal differences in conjunction with historical data. The Danes are known to have had largely the same antecedents as the other Scandinavians but they are about three centimeters shorter and have an index of 80.7 as against 78.5 for Norway. To what extent do they differ in mental make-up from other Scandinavians? In Norway a number of interesting problems arise. In sections of the country where no Lapps are known ever to have existed there is a marked percentage of dark-eyed people.19 This locally segregated group invites comparison with their typical blue-eyed "Nordic" neighbors. The latter may be compared with those Norwegian groups which have demonstrably intermarried with Lapps. Again, "pure" Lapps, such as those measured by Mantegazza, have an index over 87, while the "Lapps" of Troms, where mixture has occurred, have an index of 84.3, besides differing in other respects. Finally, the Karelian Finns differ appreciably from the Finns proper and might well be psychologically tested in comparison with them.20 If I remember Professor Retzius's statement correctly -- his volume is not accessible to me at present -- the history of the Walloons imported into Sweden is fairly well known, and certain districts still clearly reveal the infusion of Alpine blood. Here, then, a comparison of Alpine and Nordic mentality may be feasible.
No doubt many readers of this journal can suggest additional problems. When psychologists without bias shall have attacked them and arrived at statistically unexceptionable positive results, i.e., shall have established real innate differences, anthropologists will accept the conclusions regardless of their personal predilections or prejudices. In the meantime it is their duty to denounce the charlatanism so prevalent in this field and to repudiate not biology but the sham biology that invents facts and even biological "laws" to support personal views.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,
BERKELEY, CAL.
_______________
Notes:
1 F. Boas: The Mind of Primitive Man, p. 64; Kultur und Rasse, p. 67.
2 The Mind of Primitive Man, p. 76 f.
3 Ibid., p. 271 f.
4 H. F. Osborn: Men of the Old Stone Age, p. 297.
5 Ibid., p. 382.
6 Corresponding qualifications must always be understood to accompany expositions of this writer's views, which change from chapter to chapter, and sometimes even from paragraph to paragraph.
7 Madison Grant: The Passing of the Great Race, pp. 38-41, 170 f.
8 Ibid., pp. 15, 18, 169, 211.
9 Ibid., p. 210.
10 Ibid., p. 39.
11 Ibid., p. 15.
12 Ibid., p. 211.
13 G. Eliot Smith: Primitive Man (Proceedings of the British Academy, VII, 1916), pp. 37, 49 f.
14 H. F. Osborn: Men of the Old Stone Age, pp. 18,261,351.
15 H. F. Osborn in "Preface to Second Edition" of M. Grant, op. cit. xi f.
16 E. M. East and D. F. Jones: Inbreeding and Outbreeding, 1919, p. 250.
17 J. Czekanowski: Recherches anthropologiques de la Pologne, Bulletins et Memoires, Societe d'Anthropologie, 1920, p. 48 seq.
18 For the following data see V. Giuffrida-Ruggeri, A Sketch of the Anthropology of Italy, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, XLVIII, 1918, pp. 80-102.
19 Halfdan Bryn: Troms Fylkes Antropologi, Christiania, 1922, p. 19.
20 Ibid., pp. 33, 37, 174.