APRIL 5, 1912] 
tention to the drop of all absolute measure- 
ments of foreign-born Hebrews arriving in 
America after 1894. 
An attempt to combine all the material, adult 
and children, for these years, brings out the sud- 
den drop after 1893 even more clearly; and a 
similar phenomenon is repeated between the years 
1907 and 1909. For this reason I am inclined to 
believe that the type of immigrants is directly 
affected by financial panics. This can be due 
only to a selection which takes place in Europe, 
and which may also be affected by the return 
emigration from the United States to Hurope. 
The material, so far as it has been diseussed, does 
not give a definite answer to this important ques- 
tion, the solution of which would require a series 
of parallel measurements taken in Europe. 
Were there any possibility of misunder- 
standing the foregoing statements, it would 
be eliminated by the legend of Boas’s Fig. 17: 
The most striking feature of the diagram is the 
general decrease in all measurements in the period 
following the year 1894, which indicates that the 
arrivals during the period following the panic of 
1893 were underdeveloped in every direction. 
When Radosavljevich reproaches Boas for 
not studying the effect of American soil and 
financial panics on the same individuals dur- 
ing a period of time representing the age of 
his subjects (p. 420 f.), he shows that he has 
not the faintest notion of what Boas is discus- 
sing in connection with financial panics. 
Unfortunately those who attended a meeting 
of the American Ethnological Society on 
March 27, 1911, will be unable to accept this 
relatively favorable view of Dr. Radosavlje- 
vich’s attitude towards the “economic” 
theory. For at that meeting Dr. Radosavlje- 
vich, in the course of a lengthy paper, pre- 
sented a temperate, and formally quite unex- 
ceptionable, criticism of what he conceived 
+o be Boas’s economic theory. In a discussion 
Professor Boas pointed out that the criticism 
rested on a misunderstanding, and Dr. Rado- 
savljevich then—in the presence of Professor 
Farrand, Drs. Spinden, Goldenweiser and 
Fishberg, the present writer, and other anthro- 
pologists—publicly apologized for his misin- 
terpretation with much profusion of courtesy. 
SCIENCE 
539 
This circumstance seems to have escaped Dr. 
Radosavljevich’s memory. 
2. Dr. Radosavljevich asserts that Boas’s 
own observations do not support his theory of 
a change of type (pp. 406-411, 429). For, 
says he, 
All Hebrews (born in America and in different 
countries of Europe) are of the same sub-brachy- 
cephalic type. Not one age, not one sex, not one 
individual of Hebrew nativity is represented 
either by dolichocephalie or by mesocephalic type. 
The same is true in its way of the Sicilians meas- 
ured. They are of a high mesocephalic type, both 
in America and in Hurope. 
It would be difficult to find in the whole 
range of scientific literature a more naive in- 
stance of conceptual realism. For Rado- 
savljevich the conventional classificatory di- 
visions of head forms obviously have an abso- 
lute biological value. Boas states that for- 
eign-born Hebrews have an index of 84, 
American-born Hebrews an index of 81. 
That this difference is a real difference re- 
sults, of course, not from a mere inspection 
of these two figures, but from the customary 
statistical treatment of the series involved. 
But Radosavljevich’s mind is undebauched by 
statistical method. What matters a change 
of 3 units in the cephalic index so long as 
“the bulk of both American-born and for- 
eign-born Hebrew boys and girls belong to the 
same brachycephalic (or rather to the sub- 
brachycephalic) type” ? Sub-brachycephaly 
ranges from 80 to 86.9. Had Boas found that 
American-born Hebrews had an index of 
49.9, then, we may presume, Dr. Radosavlje- 
vich would have hailed the result as the dis- 
covery of an actual change of type, provided 
only that foreign-born Hebrews had an index 
of 80.001! 
As the subject of head forms has an esoteric 
tang, it may be well to illustrate the logical 
point at issue by statures. Suppose that we 
class men below 5 feet 8 in. as short, above 
‘6 feet as tall, and between these limits as 
middle-sized. Assume further that a race 
which in Europe has an average height of 5 
feet 3 in. adds three inches to its stature in 
America. Then, according to the classifica- 
