EUROPEANS IN UNITED STATES—RIPLEY. 587 
way of excuse for the rather vague and general character of this 
address, that the United States lacks certain institutions, which have 
greatly facilitated the anthropological study of Europe. We have 
no great standing armies to be recruited year by year from all sorts 
and conditions of men. All military service is voluntary and for 
hire. The only data of this sort comes to us from the time of the 
civil war. Moreover still another supply of material is rendered 
difficult of approach by reason of the attitude of our people toward 
anything savoring of government paternalism. An attempt at a 
physical census of the school children of New York, like Virchow’s 
great investigation in Germany, would probably lead to a violent 
outbreak of yellow journalism concerning the property rights of the 
individual in his offspring—an uproar which might even disturb 
the courts and the legislatures. Private initiative with the exercise 
of the greatest tact and diplomacy must alone be relied upon. For 
instance, a difficult and yet inviting field of study for the physical 
anthropologist is afforded by our mountaineers in Kentucky and 
Tennessee. A Simon-pure Anglo-Saxon stock is here isolated over 
a large area. Anticipating some years ago a vacation trip into these 
wilds, I took counsel as to modes of approach for physical measure- 
ments upon this rather inflammable human material, wherein blood 
revenge and the clan feud are still customary. This population has 
always enjoyed the proud distinction of being the tallest in the United 
States. By enlisting rivalry in a wholesale contest over the tallness 
of the men of Tennessee or Kentucky, I was told that one might, in- 
deed, hope to fill one’s saddlebags with statistics without endangering 
one’s life in the attempt. 
Judged solely from the standpoint of numbers the phenomenon 
of American immigration is stupendous. We have become so accus- 
tomed to it in the United States that we often lose sight of its 
numerical magnitude. About 25,000,000 people have come to the 
United States from all over Europe since 1820. This is about equal 
to the entire population of the United Kingdom only fifty years ago, 
at the time of our civil war. It is, again, more than the population 
of all Italy in the time of Garibaldi. Otherwise stated, this army 
of men would populate, as it stands to-day, all that most densely 
settled section of the United States north of Maryland and east of 
the Great Lakes; all New England, New York, New Jersey, and 
Pennsylvania in fact. This horde of immigrants has mainly come 
since the Irish potato famine of the middle of the last century. The 
rapid increase year by year is shown by the accompanying diagram. 
It has taken the form not of a steady growth but of an intermittent 
flow. First came the people of the British Isles after the downfall of 
Napoleon, from 2,000 in 1815 to 35,000 in 1819. Thereafter the num- 
bers are about 75,000 yearly until the Irish famine, when 368,000 
immigrants from the British Isles landed in 1852. To the English 
