586 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
ment. A human phenomenon unique in the history of the world is 
the result. 
In the description of these conditions two great difficulties are at 
once encountered. One is the recency of the phenomenon; the other 
the paucity of precise physical data. As the first immigration to 
America on a large scale is scarcely more than half a century old, 
and in its more startling and violent aspects has lasted only half 
« generation, time enough has not yet elapsed to permit a working 
out of nature’s laws. What evidences have we as to the effect of the 
new environment upon the transplanted peoples? It is amusing to 
read in the older books on ethnology, and even in the files of this 
learned body, of the undoubted effect of the American climate upon 
Kuropeans in tending to produce the black wiry hair, the bronze skin, 
and the aquiline features of the American Indians. Such conclusions 
are, of course, now understood to be a product, not of climate but of 
vivid imagination, somewhat overexcited, perhaps, by Buckle’s 
_“ History of Civilization.” Time is needed, not only to show the 
effect of the physical environment, but also to demonstrate the laws 
of inheritance which are certain to emerge from so heterogeneous a 
mix up of all the nations of the earth. Almost everything in fact 
lies in the womb of the future. We must be content at this time 
rather to indulge in speculation and prophecy than to revel in the 
more positive delights of somatological statistics. ‘This is the field 
in which a great generalizing intellect lke Huxley’s would have 
been at its best. 
The second difficulty in the study of racial conditions in the United 
States is the lack of precise physical data. This may be ascribed in 
large measure to the overwhelming insistency and importance of 
other allied concerns. This ethnic phenomenon, tremendous and im- 
portant as it is for pure science, 1s for the moment overshadowed by 
others, social and political. The attention of students is compelled 
by the urgency of the problems presented by the affairs of men, 
rather than by their physical persons. Questions of living wages, 
of overcrowding. of population in the great cities, of public health, 
of moral chaos, of political demoralization, are demanding immediate 
solution at the hands of science. And then again, in the purely 
anthropological field, there are the other inviting paths of study af- 
forded by the presence of the negro and the disappearance of the 
aboriginal Indians. Both of these should be of absorbing interest to 
specialists, the former unfortunately, much neglected; but the latter, 
the study of the Indian, of immediate concern because whatever is 
to be done must be done at once. The day will indeed come when 
science will awake to the opportunities presented by the ethnic com- 
position of the present white population of the United States, but that 
day is not yet here. And then, finally, it should be borne in mind by 
