266 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLI. No. 1051 



leads either to false results or to the hope- 

 lessness of reaching the truth.^" 



Professor Myres in the closing lines of his 

 little book, "The Dawn of History," ad- 

 mits and emphasizes the vagueness of re- 

 sults in trying to estimate the relations of 

 history, geography and biology. But his 

 final word is of good cheer, 



If the reader is moved to complain with that 

 other, ' ' I see men. as trees walking, ' ' let him re- 

 member that he who said that, was well on the 

 way to "see every man clearly." 



Thus far our notice of our difQculties has 

 been general. Let us look at the questions 

 of race. "Race is the key to history — what 

 is the key to race ? ' ' Thus Griffis inscribes 

 the title page to a volume on Japan. In 

 estimating the force of a given environment 

 on a given time how much shall we allow 

 for race? But we must go back of that. 

 How did environment go into the making 

 of race 1 But suppose we are not sure what 

 a race is and can not with any agreement 

 analyze and classify present races! Au- 

 thorities agree neither upon race, nor upon 

 the efficiency of race in relation to environ- 

 ment. Thus one authority assigns a race 

 cause for the higher status of long heads as 

 compared with broad heads in certain parts 

 of France. The long heads have more 

 wealth and pay more taxes than their 

 brachycephalic countrymen. Is this really 

 a racial result ? Or is it due to a fortunate 

 occupation of richer lands, bringing in its 

 train the higher professional and social 

 status and the urban tendencies of the 

 northern blonds 1 The criteria of necessity 

 and universality need to be pressed home. 



The present writer has difficulty, being a 

 layman, in understanding the ethnologists 

 when they classify races. It is increasing 

 to one's comfort therefore and saving to 

 self-respect to find a member of the anthro- 

 pological fraternity saying of the develop- 



20 ' ' Anthropogeographie, ' ' I., 54. 



ment of races that it is " immensely difficult 

 to separate the effects of various factors," 

 and that, "it is not edifying to look at half 

 a dozen books upon the races of mankind, 

 and find half a dozen accounts of their re- 

 lationships having scarcely a single state- 

 ment in common. Far better to face the 

 fact that race still baffles us almost com- 

 pletely."" 



We may add a further observation, that 

 much in this field depends upon paleog- 

 raphy, if we are to decipher the origin and 

 migration of races. But here, as Marett 

 says, is a rather kaleidoscopic science, for 

 the continents and bridges which it calls up 

 out of the ocean have a way of crumbling. 



Let us illustrate by the so-called Aryan 

 question. It used to be an item in the eth- 

 nological creed that most European peoples 

 using languages of cognate features came 

 thither from central Asia by the way of 

 India. But many years ago now it was 

 shown that common langniage did not prove 

 race kinship. Nor do names of trees and 

 other plants suffice to trace migrations, for 

 men change the names of their trees, and 

 fioras migrate in the long marches of time. 

 It has been remarked that if we had no his- 

 torical knowledge to the contrary, tobacco 

 and potato might be taken as parts of a 

 European tongue, rather than a loan from 

 the Caribbean natives. 



So come the measurer and the calipers 

 in place of the linguist and set up the 

 physical criteria of head form, stature and 

 color, and put in place of a comfortable 

 and discredited generalization the chaos of 

 opinion which is often the precursor to 

 more fixed and defensible conclusions. But 

 such conclusions have not yet been reached. 

 So uncertain is the status of the problem 

 that one writer on the sources of the Ger- 

 manic invasions says that while some put 

 the origin in Africa, others trace racial dif- 



21 E. E. Marett, ' ' Anthropology, ' ' 61. 



