5o6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



persecution and motives for emigration were ten times as strong 

 as even under the iron rule of the Russian Czar. 



History, then, as I read it, has nothing to say against the purity 

 of descent of contemporary Jews from those of the Bible. What 

 has anthropology, as interpreted by Professor Ripley, to produce 

 against this negative evidence of history? Mainly, it would appear, 

 the fact that Jews of the present day are predominantly brachy- 

 cephalic. Of the fact there can be little doubt. The list given 

 by Professor Ripley in the Popular Science Monthly (vol. liv, page 

 340), of over twenty-five hundred heads, would be sufficient to 

 establish this. But the very uniformity of the index is almost suffi- 

 cient by itself to refute the deduction Professor Ripley draws from 

 it. If there had been any general amount of admixture, that would 

 have tended rather to produce variety than uniformity. Surely 

 Professor Ripley does not contend that the Jewish young men and 

 maidens, who, on his theory, so freely welcomed outsiders into the 

 family circle, have never fallen in love with long-headed persons of 

 the opposite sex. His argument requires that the original Jews of 

 the Diaspora were long-headed, and that they have uniformly inter- 

 married with the broad-headed varieties of the genus Jiomo. Now, 

 he adduces no evidence whatever that Jews originally were dolicho- 

 cephalic, and even if he succeeded in proving this he would have the 

 further difficulty of finding a European race with skulls so broad 

 as to raise the average index of the race considerably over 80. If 

 we assume that the original index of the Jewish skull was 75, Pro- 

 fessor Ripley would have to find some race with an average index 

 of nearly 90 before the mixture would raise the contemporary Jew- 

 ish skull to its present broad-headedness. Dr. Ammon has shown * 

 that there are only two small regions in Europe where such abnor- 

 mally broad skulls exist, neither of them centers of Jewish popu- 

 lation. 



But Dr. Ammon has shown more. By comparison with the 

 skulls found in the long barrows in Germany, he shows that the 

 index of German skulls has risen from 77 to no less than 83 during 

 the last thousand years or so; and he further shows, by reasoning 

 similar to that which I have just given, that this rise in index can 

 not be due to any admixture of race. Now, to what is this rise in 

 head index due? Dr. Ammon, who is a professed disciple of Weis- 

 mann, does not go into the question of causation, but the simplest 

 and most obvious explanation is that cranial capacity has followed 

 brain development, and that, roughly speaking, brachycephalism 

 implies intellectual development. A few instances may be given, 

 confirming this impression of the superior intellectual capacity of 



* Die Nitiirliche Auslese beim Menschen, Jena, 1883. 



n 



