PIGMENTATION IN OLD AMERICANS HRDLICKA. 473 



pared with those on the Americans of the future, but we have no old 

 records of this nature. 



The ancestors of the Old Americans, as apparent from the infor- 

 mation given the examiner, were very largely, probably more than 

 four-fifths, immigrants from the British Isles. They were English, 

 Welsh, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, with a scattering of Dutch, French 

 (Huguenots), Irish, and German. In the absence of old American 

 records on pigmentation it would in the second line be most desirable, 

 therefore, to have such data from the seventeenth to nineteenth cen- 

 turies from Great Britain, but these are also wanting. All that is 

 available are data on the English-speaking people from this and the 

 latter part of the last century, and even these we can use only to a 

 limited extent, the observations having been made and recorded in a 

 different manner. As to data from Holland, Germany, or other 

 countries, they could hardly be of help in this connection. 



As to data on Americans in general, there are only the very im- 

 perfect records of the Civil War, and those equally imperfect ob- 

 tained during the demobilization after the end of the World War. 

 In neither case were the observations made by scientific or properly 

 trained men. Baxter (Statistics, etc., I, 60) says of those in the Civil 

 War : " The instructions given to surgeons of boards of enrollment 

 were framed with a view to the speediest achievement of the object 

 of the draft, and not to the acquisition of anthropological facts. 

 Thence arose defects in the data, from a scientific point of view, which 

 have often been regretted during the preparation of this work." 12 

 The "Army Anthropology" volume of the World War 13 charitably 

 says nothing about the actual method of securing the data, though it 

 would have been better to make a straightforward statement. It may 

 suffice to say that the actual examinations and recording, though 

 under the general supervision of good men, had to be made in this 

 case after a brief and insufficient instruction, and often under stress 

 and hurry, by numbers of unselected men from the ranks assigned 

 for the " work " by the officers of the camps ; men who had no heart in 

 the work, who had never done anything similar, were unacquainted 

 with the metric system, had inaccurate instruments as well as 

 classification, and were often seen by the writer, who specially visited 

 some of the camps to satisfy himself as to the nature of the examina- 

 tions, to be grossly careless. Moreover the World War records on 

 the pigmentation of the American born were made wholly worthless 



"For originals see Gould (B. A.) — The Military and Anthropological Statistics of the 

 War of the Rebellion. 8°, N. Y., 1865; Baxter (J. H.)-— Statistics, Medical & Anthro- 

 pological, of the Provost Marshal-General's Bureau, 4°, 1875, I, 60. See also Statistical 

 Report of Sickness and Mortality in U. S. Army from 1839 to 1855. 4°, Wash., 1856 ; 

 and Military Statistics of United States of America, 4", Berlin, 1863. 



"Davenport (Charles B.) with A. G. Love — Army Anthropology, 8°, Vol. XV of Sta- 

 tistic Med. Dept, U. S. Army, Wash., 1921. 



