THE EUROPEAN POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES. 
The Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1908." 
By WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, Ph. D., 
Professor of Economics in Harvard University. 
The population of Europe may, in a rough way, be divided into 
an east and a west. The contrast between the two may be best illus- 
trated perhaps in geological terms. Everywhere these populations 
have been laid down originally in more or less distinct strata. In 
the Balkan States and Austria-Hungary this stratification is recent 
and still distinct; while in western Europe the several layers have 
become metamorphosed by the fusing heat of nationality and the 
pressure of civilization. But in both instances these populations are 
what the geologist would term sedimentary. In attempting a de- 
scription of the racial problems of the United States your attention 
is invited to an entirely distinct formation which, in continuation of 
our geological figure, may best be characterized by the term eruptive. 
We have to do not with the slow processes of growth by deposit 
or accretion; but with violent and voleanic dislocation. We are 
called upon to traverse a lava field of population, suddenly cast forth 
from Europe and spread indiscriminately over a new continent. In 
Europe the populations have grown up from the soil. They are 
still embedded in it, a part of it. They are the product of their im- 
mediate environments; dark in the southern half, blonde at the north, 
stunted where the conditions are harsh, well developed where the 
land is fat. Even as between city and country, conditions have been 
so long settled that one may trace the results in the physical traits 
of the inhabitants. It was my endeavor in the “ Races of Europe ” 
to describe these conditions in detail. But in America the people, 
one may almost say, have dropped from the sky. They are in the 
land but not yet an integral part of it. The population product is 
artificial and exotic. It is as yet unrelated to its physical environ- 
@Reprinted by permission from The Journal of the Royal Anthropological 
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London, vol. 38, July to December, 1998, 
pp. 221-240. 
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