PREFACE 



It has long been a reproach to American science that now, for many 

 years, the branch of Physical Anthropology has been so little cultivated, 

 and this the more because of our early prestige in this very field and be- 

 cause of our unrivalled opportunities. 



When Morton, in 1839, published his Crania Americana, and followed 

 this in 1844 by a similar work, the Crania Aegyptiaca, he gave the United 

 States a leading place in the then new science of Craniology, but now 

 after eighty years, in this and in related fields, American names are as 

 rare in bibliographies as American merchant ships have been until recently 

 upon the high seas. With the vast possibilities for ethnological study 

 furnished by our aborigines, with the importation in the past of large 

 numbers of negroes from Africa, which are now numbered by millions, 

 and with the hordes of alien peoples from all parts of the world, who seek 

 a foothold in the still new continent, not even Rome herself, in Imperial 

 times, could supply such enormous ethnological material, yet the advan- 

 tages taken of such opportunities have been but slight. Every large 

 European power, and at least one Asiatic one (Japan), has surpassed the 

 United States in Anthropometric work. In this line of Anthropometry, 

 or Biometric Ethnology, especially, unheeded by and almost unknown to, 

 American science, a great body of facts has been compiled in Europe, the 

 facts being obtained by means of European instruments, collected by 

 means of European technical methods, and rendered significant by means 

 of European scholarship. 



Some twenty years ago the growing need of unifying the technical 

 measurements, at least those most commonly employed, became more and 

 more apparent, and led to the adoption of a set of prescriptions governing 

 the more important measurements of the skull, and of the head and facial 

 features in the living. This was established at the meeting of 1906 

 of the International Congress of Anthropologists, held at Monaco, and 

 the Committee consisted of representatives of France, Germany, Switzer- 

 land and Italy, but neither England nor America. The official report was 

 in French by the Secretary, M. Papillault, and was published in the 

 periodical L'Anthropologie. The movement towards a standardization 

 of measurements excited a continually increasing interest, and its next 

 official manifestation came at the Congress of the same body in 1912, 

 meeting at Geneva. The Committee which prepared this report was a 

 larger one (24 members), and included, beside the countries represented at 

 the former one, Spain, Russia, Great Britain, Russian Poland, Hungary 

 and the United States. This second report consisted of standardized 



