6 LABORATORY MANUAL OF ANTHROPOMETRY 



who, in his extensive text-book of Craniometry (Grundziige einer syste- 

 matischen Kraniometrie, Stuttgart, 1890) enumerates for the skull alone 

 no fewer than 5371 linear measurements and projections, together with 

 a proportionate number of indices, and many hundreds of angles, tri- 

 angles, polygons, etc. To him the goal of the anthropometrist appears 

 to be in part to make so complete a mathematical mensuration of a 

 given skull that it could be faithfully reproduced if destroyed, but in 

 great part also to seek every possible way in which such an object may 

 be measured. Is it any wonder that to him the complete and satisfactory 

 measurement of a single skull is a sufficient subject for a Doctor's 

 thesis ? 



Quite the opposite view is that of the veteran Roman anthropologist, 

 Giuseppe Sergi, who urges the study of varying shapes by the method 

 usually employed by the zoologist and anatomist, that is, mainly by the 

 eye. In commenting, for instance, upon the sorting out of European 

 head types by the length-breadth indices of the cranium, a very obvious 

 and elementary sort of anthropometry, he asks how many species of lark 

 we should get if the ornithologist should attempt to separate them by 

 the ingenious method of measuring the total length from tip of beak 

 to tail and divide this by the wing-spread. He counsels the application 

 of what he calls the "zoological" rather than the anthropometric method 

 to the study of racial skulls, and thinks that one should learn to dis- 

 tinguish them by characters that one can perceive without measurement. 

 "As a zoologist can recognize the character of an animal species or 

 variety belonging to any region of the globe or any period of time, so also 

 should an anthropologist if he follows the same method of investigating 

 the morphological characters of the skull."* 



It seems plain that somewhere in the wide range between these two 

 extremes there is the legitimate place for a rational anthropometry, an 

 anthropometry that employs mathematical methods in the definite 

 expression of morphological relationships, and devises various methods of 

 measurement to bring out differences already perceptible to the eye 

 of the trained observer. As the most prominent exponent of this form of 

 the science, whose goal is ever the detailed observation and comparison 

 of the various representatives of man and man's allies at present and in 

 the past, and who employs the technique of anthropometry most suc- 

 cessfully in the pursuit of this goal, we have the great anthropologist of 

 the University of Strassburg, the late Gustav Schwalbe,and the beginning 

 anthropometrist can do no better than study any of the classical papers 

 produced by this man during the last twenty years of his life (1896-1916) 

 in order to gain a clear idea of the great service of measurements as a 

 handmaid to morphology. In the field of comparative human evolu- 

 tion, in the comparison of modern human types with the various pre- 

 historic forms, he has used the data gained from indices and angles to 



* SERGI, G.: The Mediterranean race, Scribner's, 1901, p. 36. 



