ft.— anthropoloov. . 137 



is to be useful to the State it must turn from these rusty old weapons, 

 these measurements of stature and recoi'ds of eye-coiour to more 

 certain appreciations of bodily health and mental aptitude — to what we 

 may term ' vigorimetry ' and to psychometry. 



Some of you may be inclined to ask : And how do you know that 

 these superficial size-, shape-, and pigment-characters are not closely 

 associated with measurements of soundness of body and soundness of 

 mind? The answer to this question is twofold, and I must ask you 

 to follow me for a moment into what appears a totally different sub- 

 ject. I refer to a ' pure race.' Some biologists apparently believe 

 they can isolate a pure race, but in the case of man, I feel sure that 

 pm-ity of race is a merely relative term. For a given character one 

 race is purer than a second, if the scientific measure of variation of 

 that character is less than it is in the second. In loose wording, for 

 we cannot express ourselves accurately without mathematical symbols, 

 that race is purer for which on the average the individuals are closer to 

 type for the bulk of ascertainable characters than are the characters 

 in a- second race. But an absolutely pure race in man defies definition. 

 The more isolated a group of men ha-s remained, the longer it has 

 lived under the same environment, and the more limited its habitat, 

 the less variation from type it will exhibit, and we can legitimately 

 speak of it as possessing greater purity. We, most of us, probably 

 believe in a single origin of man. But as anthropologists we are 

 inclined to speak as if at the dawn of history there were a number of 

 pure races, each with definite physical and mental characteristics ; if 

 this were true, which I do not believe, it could only mean that up to 

 that period there had been extreme isolation, extremely differentiated 

 environments, and so marked differences in the direction and rate of 

 mental and physical evolution. But what we know historically of 

 folk- wanderings, folk-mixings, and folk-absorptions have undoubtedly 

 been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, of which we know 

 only a small historic fragment. Have we any real reason for suppos- 

 ing that ' purity of race ' existed up to the beginning of history, and 

 that we have all got badly mixed up since? 



Let us, however, grant that there were purer races at the beginning 

 of history than we find to-day. Let us suppose a Nordic race with 

 a certain stature, a given pigmentation, a given shape of head, and a 

 given mentality. And, again, we will suppose an Alpine race, differ- 

 ing markedly in type from the Nordic race. What happens if we cross 

 members of the two races and proceed to a race of hybrids? A 

 Mendelian would tell us that these characters are sorted out like, cards 

 from a pack in all sorts of novel combinations. A Nordic mentality 

 will be found with short stature and dark eyes. A tall but brachy- 

 cephalic individual will combine Alpine mentality with blue eyes. 

 Without accepting fully the Mendelian theory we can at least accept 

 the result of mass observations, which show that the association 

 between superficial physical measurements and mentality is of the 

 slenderest kind. If you keep within one class, my own measurements 

 show me that there is only the slightest pelation between intelligence 

 and the size and shape of the head. Pigmentation in this country seems 



