418 SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.—H. 
4, Dr. C. Wissuer.—The Segregation of Racial Characters in a 
Population. 
The usual way of comprehending a racial group is by a cluster of anatomical 
characters. The attempt has always been made to deal with these as wholes, 
but when attention is fixed upon a single character and its distribution followed 
throughout a population, or even over the world, the basic nature of the 
phenomena is revealed. According to the old assumption, a population may be 
expected to become strictly uniform in course of time. Yet when any character, 
as colour of eye, hair, &c., is regarded, it 1s found not to be uniformly dis- 
tributed, but segregated. Further, it can be shown that this segregation tends 
to take the same form in all cases. This form, again, is in its general character 
similar to the distribution forms for culture traits. It follows, then, that the 
diffusion of anthropological characters is of one general type, whether the traits 
be cultural or somatic. Somatic diffusion, or the spread of a character in a 
population, is, therefore, as much a matter of distribution as of morphology. 
This has an important methodological bearing upon the problem of morpho- 
logical parallelism in human types versus single origin. This problem is just 
as pressing as in the case of culture, and cannot be solved by the study of 
structure alone. 
5. Mr. T. Wrncate Topp.—The Relation of Industry and Social Con- 
ditions to Cranial Types in Cleveland. 
The only individuals whose cranial capacity can be completely studied are 
those social ineffectives who have so completely failed in life that they are 
ultimately found in the dissecting-room. Among these people we have been able 
to segregate four types of male white crania upon a basis, not of cephalic index 
or thickness, but of relation of capacity to linear dimensions. The proportional 
numbers of these types in the dissecting-room population vary from year to year, 
so that the average cranial capacity fluctuates from year to year. In periods 
of depression, 1919 and 1921 for example, the dissecting-room population is 
swelled by the addition of large-brained men with well-filled crania. In years of 
prosperity like 1918 the big-brained people do not appear, but the population 
is composed of smailer-brained folk with ill-filled crania. The amount of brain 
contained in any cranium influences contours more than linear dimensions. 
6. Dr. T. Asuspy.—Recent Discoveries in Italy. 
7. Dr. T. Asupy.—The Roman Road System as a means for the ~ 
Spread of Roman Military Power, Trade, and Civilisation. 
Friday, August 8. 
8. Mr. H. Batrour.—The Art of Stencilling in the Fuji Islands and 
the Question of its Origin. 
9. Dr. ALexanpER GOLDENWEISER.—The Historical School of 
Ethnology in America. 
The distinctive traits of the ‘ American School’ can be best seen against 
the background of two other schools : (1) the classical evolutionary theory with 
its tenets of psychic unity, environmental similarity and organic determinism 
of cultural development through uniform, gradual and progressive stages; and 
(2) the diffusionist theory (in Graebner’s version), with its quantitative and quali- 
tative criteria of similarity, its mechanical juxtaposition of cultural features, 
its disregard of time and space, and its hypothetical culture waves and districts. 
As contrasted with these, the American School accepts the two principles of 
independent development of cultural features (creativeness), and of diffusion of 
such features through historic contact, but it uses them not as universal prin- 
ciples of interpretation hut as heuristic tools. 
The theoretical position of the American School is best illustrated by the 
