436 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1921. 



My invariable reply is: Don't start measuring anything at all until 

 you have settled the problems you wish to answer, and then just 

 measure the characters in an adequate number of your boys, which 

 m ill enable you to solve those problems. Use your school as a labora- 

 tory, not as a weighhouse. 



And I might add, if I were not in dread of giving offense : And 

 most certainly do not measure anything at all if you have no problem 

 to solve, for unless you have you can not have the true spirit of the 

 anthropologist, and you will merely increase that material up and 

 down in the schools of the country which nobody is turning to any 

 real use. 



Which of us, who is a parent, has not felt the grave responsibility 

 of advising a child on the choice of a profession ? We have before us, 

 perhaps, a few meager examination results, an indefinite knowledge 

 of the self-chosen occupations of the child, and perhaps some regard 

 to the past experience of the family or clan. Possibly w r e say John is 

 good with his hands and does not care for lessons ; therefore he should 

 be an engineer. That may be a correct judgment if we understand 

 by engineer, the engine driver or mechanic. It is not true if we think 

 of the builders of Forth Bridges and Assuan Dams. Such men work 

 with the head and not the hand. One of the functions of. the anthro- 

 pological laboratory of a great university, one of the functions of a 

 school anthropometric laboratory, should be to measure those physical 

 and mental characters and their interrelations upon which a man's 

 success in a given career so much depends. Its function should be to 

 guide youth in the choice of a calling, and in the case of a school to 

 enable the headmaster to know something of the real nature of indi- 

 vidual boys, so that that much-tried man does not feel compelled to 

 hide his ignorance by cabalistic utterances when parents question him 

 on what their son is fitted for. 



Wide, however, as is the anthropometric material in our universi- 

 ties and public schools, it touches only a section of the population. 

 The modern anthropologist has to go further; he has to enter the 

 doors of the primary schools ; he has to study the general population 

 in all its castes, in its craftsmen, and its sedentary workers. Anthro- 

 pology has to be useful to commerce and to the State, not only in 

 association with foreign races, but still more in the selection of the 

 right men and women for the staff of factory, mine, office, and trans- 

 port. The selection of workmen to-day by what is too often a rough 

 trial and discharge method is one of the wasteful factors of produc- 

 tion. Few employers even ask what trades parents and grandparents 

 have followed, nor consider the relation of a man's physique and men- 

 tality to his proposed employment. I admit that progress in this 

 direction will be slow, but if the work undertaken in this sense by 



