[Annals N. Y. Acad. Sci., Vol. XXI, pp. 177-183. 20 March, 1912.] 



THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN RACE. 1 

 By Eranz Boas. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : — The custom which demands that your 

 President address you at the time of the annual meeting — not when the 

 Academy is in formal session, but when seated around the hospitable 

 board — lays upon him a difficult duty. You expect from him the best 

 that he can give in his science ; and still what he gives should be appro- 

 priate to the hour, when in pleasant personal intercourse thoughts find 

 expression as they arise, and the stimulated imagination carries us away 

 to more daring flights than those we venture on when our thoughts are 

 given to serious work. Permit me, therefore, to join in the imaginative 

 mood and to lay aside the scruples and doubts of the study and to tell 

 you how in my dreams the stones that we are shaping with arduous labor, 

 and that may in time form a solid structure, but none of which is finished 

 as yet, seem to fit together; and let me sketch before your eyes the airy 

 picture of a history of the American race as it appears before me in dim 

 outlines. 



Man had arisen from his animal ancestors. His upright posture, his 

 large brain, the beginnings of articulate and organized language and the 

 use of tools marked the contrast between him and animals. Already a 

 differentiation of human types had set in. From an unknown ancestral 

 type, that may have been related to the Australoid type, two funda- 

 mentally distinct forms had developed — the Negroid type and the Mon- 

 goloid type. The former spread all around the Indian Ocean ; the latter 

 found his habitat in northern and central Asia, and also reached Europe 

 and the New World. The uniformity of these types ceased with their 

 wide spread over the continents, and the isolation of small communities. 

 Bushmen, Negroes and Papuans mark some divergent developments of 

 the one type; Americans, East Asiatics and Malays, some of the other. 

 The development of varieties in each group showed similarities in all 

 regions where the type occurred. The races located on both sides of the 

 Pacific Ocean exhibited the tendency to loss of pigmentation of skin, eyes 

 and hair ; to a strong development of the nose, and to a reduction of the 



1 Address of the retiring President, read at the annual meeting of the Academy, 18 

 December, 1011. 



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