SOCIAL AND WORLD ASPECTS 229 



race on the two islands now number about a thousand. 

 They should form excellent material for an anthro- 

 pometric study of a population descended through 

 several generations from original crosses between 

 English and Polynesians. 



The most ambitious of such studies which has yet 

 been made is probably that of Fischer (191 3) on the 

 Reheboth hybrid people inhabiting a portion of the 

 area which was formerly German South- West Africa. 

 These people were derived from crosses between 

 Hottentot women and Boer men, which began over 

 a century ago. They now number, perhaps, 3,000. 

 In a general anthropological and ethnographical study 

 of these people, Fischer concludes that they are a 

 well characterised but very variable group. The 

 characters of the parent races are combined in the 

 greatest variety of ways, showing continued segrega- 

 tion, and not a permanent blend. The first crosses are, 

 in general, intermediate, and when crossed back with 

 either race, they resemble more the race with which 

 they were recrossed. They are said to be sound, 

 strong, and ver}^ fertile, having an average of 7-4 

 children per famil}^ The inheritance of individual 

 characters, such as hair form and colour, eye colour, 

 skin colour, shape of nose, nasal index, form of eyelid, 

 breadth of forehead, etc., was studied and found to 

 show alternative inheritance; but the observations, 

 while valuable, are scarcel}' sufficiently detailed to 

 furnish critical evidence on all these points. Never- 

 theless, a body of valuable data of inheritance is 

 brought together. An important conclusion reached 

 is that the size of body and length of face is greater 

 than in either parent race, while the fertility is found 

 to be undiminished and the sex ratio unaltered. 



The latter conclusion is, however, not in harmony 

 with the statistical data on the sex ratio in hybrids 

 obtained by other investigations. Thus, Pearl and 



