THE SCIENCE OF MAN PEARSON. 425 



of span, of head measurement, or of pigmentation categories. The 

 psychophysical and psychophysiological characters are of far greater 

 weight in the struggle of nations to-day than the superficial measure- 

 ments of man's body. Physique, in the fullest sense, counts some- 

 thing still, but it is physique as measured by health, not by stature 

 or eye-color. But character, strength of will, mental quickness 

 count more, and if anthropometry is to be useful to the State it must 

 turn from these rusty old weapons, these measurements of stature 

 and records of eye-color to more certain appreciations of bodily 

 health and mental aptitude — to what we may term " vigorimetry " 

 and to psychometry. 



Some of you may be inclined to ask : And how do you Know that 

 these superficial size-, shape-, and pigment-characters are not closely 

 associated with measurements of soundness of body and soundness of 

 mind? The answer to this question is twofold, and I must ask you 

 to follow me for a moment into what appears a totally different sub- 

 ject. I refer to a " pure race." Some biologists apparently believe 

 they can" isolate a pure race, but in the case of man, I feel sure that 

 'purity of race is a merely relative term. For a given character one 

 race is purer than a second, if the scientific measure of variation of 

 that character is less than it is in the second. In loose wording, for 

 we can not express ourselves accurately without mathematical sym- 

 bols, that race is purer for which on the average the individuals are 

 closer to type for the bulk of ascertainable characters than are the 

 characters in a second race. But an absolutely pure race in man defies 

 definition. The more isolated a group of men has remained, the 

 longer it has lived under the same environment, and the more limited 

 its habitat, the less variation from type it will exhibit, and we can 

 legitimately speak of it as possessing greater purity. We, most of us, 

 probably believe in a single origin of man. But as anthropologists 

 we are inclined to speak as if at the dawn of history there were a 

 number of pure races, each with definite physical and mental char- 

 acteristics; if this were true, which I do not believe, it could only 

 mean that up to that period there had been extreme isolation, ex- 

 tremely differentiated environments, and thus marked differences in 

 the direction and rate of mental and physical evolution. But what we 

 know historically of folk wanderings, folk mixings, and folk absorp- 

 tions has undoubtedly been going on prehistorically for hundreds of 

 thousands of years, of which we have recorded only a small historic 

 fragment. Have we any real reason for supposing that " purity of 

 race " existed up to the beginning of history, and that we have all 

 got badly mixed up since ? 



Let us, however, grant that there were purer races at the beginning 

 of history than we find to-day. Let us suppose a Nordic race with 

 a certain stature, a given pigmentation, a given shape of head, and a 



