November i8, ^892.] 



SCIENCE. 



285 



CURRENT NOTES ON ANTHROPOLOGY.— XIX. 



[Edited by D. G. Brinton, M.D., LL.D.'] 



[Dr. Brinton has been appointed, by the President, a commis- 

 sioner to represent the United States at the Columbian Historical 

 Exhibition in Madrid, and will be absent from the country about 

 two months. One more instalment of these notes will appear 

 before his return. — Ed.] 



The Congress of Criminal Anthropology. 



The third International Congress of Criminal Anthropology 

 was held in Brussels Aug. 7-13, and resulted in a decide 1 advance 

 in this extremely valuable braiich of science. Although Professor 

 Lombroso of Turin, who is looked upon almost as the father of 

 the subject, was absent, and indeed the whole of the Italian 

 contingent — disgruntled, for some reason, it was alleged — 

 stopped away, yet there were very active discussions and a very 

 marked change of base in regard to the physiology of the crimi- 

 nal classes. 



Those who have followed the French and Italian writers are 

 aware that they have taken great pains to define the "criminal 

 type." It has been alleged that habitual criminals have a lower 

 average cerebral capacity than others; that their foreheads are 

 retreating, and their brain developed posteriorly; that their lower 

 ,jaws are strongly pronounced and their ears frequently deformed ; 

 their hair thick and coarse, but their beard scanty; and so on. 

 Such was the " criminel nfe " of the French, the " uomo delin- 

 ■quente " of tlie Italians. But the Brussels Congress may be said 

 to have upset all this interesting theory. Dr. Tarnovski of St. 

 Petersburg and Dr. Naecke, from a very wide collation of obser- 

 vations, denied any special physical peculiarity in criminals, either 

 male or female. 



The tendency of all the leading speakers was to look upon 

 crime as the result of psychical and social rather than physical 

 peculiarities. It is true that physical abnormalities are more 

 frequent in the criminal class, but there is no constant relation 

 between any one of them and crime. Very many criminals have 

 an inherited tendency to some form of mental alienation; many 

 others owe their character to purely personal and social influences 

 of a deleterious character. Society is far more to blame for 

 their existence than has hitherto been acknowledged; and if the 

 tide of crime is to be stayed, we must liave recourse to sounder 

 moral instruction, more judicious systems of legal procedure, 

 and an improved doctrine of punishment. This is the important 

 practical lesson taught by the Brussels Congress. 

 The next Congress was fixed for 1896, in Geneva. 



Shape of Sclavic Skulls. 



In connection with the article on this subject contributed to 

 Science, Oct. 38, by Dr. John Beddoe, I may refer to the meas- 

 urements of Czech skulls, from villages of pure blood in Bohemia, 

 by Dr. L. Niederle, published in the June issue of the Miftheil. 

 der Anthrop. Oesell. in Wien. He found them decidedly brachy- 

 cephalic, averaging about 8.5. the skulls of women being more so 

 than those of the males. They were also leptoprosopic, meso- 

 rhinie, and liypsicephalic. These peculiarities correspond closely 

 to those noticed in the living population of Bohemia, especially 

 where of pure Sclavic blood. Most of the school-children are 

 broad-headed, more markedly so than the adults. They lose in a 

 measure this trait on growing to adult years. The dolichoid 

 form is distinctly more frequent and pronounced in living men 

 than in women, even in the same village and of the same family. 



Lingaistic Affinities of the Ancient Coptic. 



In a memoir prepared for the tenth session of the International 

 Congress of Orientalists, Dr. Carl Abel presents a summary of 

 the evidence which he has been industriously collecting for years 

 to prove the etymological relationship of the language of ancient 

 Egypt with the Indo-European stock. It is an extremely intri- 

 cate subject, and to many his methods will appear strange, and 

 at first sight repellant. He claims, for instance, that a primitive 

 radical often has two meanings which are the precise ppposjtesof 



each other, a? "good" and '-bad," or "white" and "black." 

 Again, that such a radical was frequently reversed in its sounds, 

 for example, that rak and kar are tlie same word, the one being 

 read and originally pronounced backwards, but both are to be 

 construed as the same root. He also presents a series of substi- 

 tutions in sounds, one organ occasionally taking the place of an- 

 other in utterance, according to definable laws. 



These novelties to old -fashioned students of Aryan and Semitic 

 tongues have not aided to make his views popular; but they have 

 been accepted by such distinguished scholars as Professor Maspero 

 of Paris, Professor Harlez of Brussels, and Professor Sayce of 

 Oxford, as throwing a new and valuable light on the phonetic 

 laws of ancient Coptic. If European scholars would study more 

 diligently the aboriginal tongues of America, they would learn 

 that all these, and various other linguistic processes of which 

 they seem to have very faint comprehension, are part and parcel 

 of the natural development of human speech. 



Pre-Columbian Migrations in America. 



In the October number of the Proceedings of the Royal Geo- 

 graphical Society, Judge E. F. Im Thurn has an instructive arti- 

 cle on British Guiana, giving much fresh information about the 

 economical conditions and gold-diggings there. At its close, he 

 speaks of the native population, and indulges in some specula- 

 tions as to the origin of the Caribs and Arawacks, who at the time 

 of the discovery inhabited the West Indian archipelago and the 

 northern shores of South America. He maintains that both these 

 nations migrated from the northern continent, following the 

 chain of islands till they reached the southern mainland, where 

 the Caribs located to the east of the mouth of the Orinoco and the 

 Arawacks to the west. The Warraus he believes to have been the 

 antecedent occupants of the region. 



As Mr. Im Thurn has written much and well on the Indians of 

 Guiana, I feel called upon to state that there are no facts which 

 justify the theory here advanced, and that every evidence points 

 unequivocally in the opposite direction. Both Caribs and Ara- 

 wacks unquestionably came from the interior of the South Ameri- 

 can continent and moved northward, the Arawacks reaching as 

 far as the Bahamas, where Columbus found them, while the 

 Caribs had no permanent villages north of Jamaica. The re- 

 searches of von den Steinen, Adam, Ehrenreich, and others have 

 settled this beyond reasonable doubt. All the inhabitants of 

 Cuba were Arawacks, but had come from the south. Not a trace 

 of either Carib or Arawack dialects occurs in North America, 

 but they can be found southward to the Rio de la Plata. 



Civilization as Influenced by Race. 



The perspicuous writer, M. Gustave Le Bon, has an interesting 

 article in the Revue Scientiflque for October, on the evolution of 

 civilization and the arts as influenced by race. His thesis is that 

 what we call civilization is the expression of certain modes of 

 thought and feeling peculiar to each race; that one race can never 

 thoroughly assimilate the civilization of another; and that the 

 evolution of culture never follows parallel lines in the different 

 races, one developing one element, another diverse elements. 

 This is especially true of arts and religions, these bearing in their 

 evolution little proportion to the remaining momenta of culture. 

 A lower race, he maintains, cannot derive much of real utility to 

 itself from another of considerably higher civilization; and, in 

 general, whatever a race thus borrows, it transforms to suit its 

 own individuality and racial psychology, so that little of the 

 original is left. 



These opinions he supports by an examination of the traits of 

 the world religions in different races. Islam in India is no longer 

 monotheistic, but as polytheistic as Brahmanism; so is Chris- 

 tianity among Indo-Germanic peoples; marabouts, saints, virgins, 

 and incarnations of deity are worshipped, not at all the one God 

 of the original Semitic cult. In a similar manner government, 

 institutions, and arts are sure to be transformed by the racial 

 mind, acting unconsciously, and adapted to its peculiarities. He 

 concludes that the effort to force European civilization upon the 

 lower races, unless in a much modified form, i« vain and hope- 

 less 



