August 23, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



293 



La Democrazia nella Beligione e nella Scienza- 



Studi sulV America. By Angelo Mosso. 



Milan. 12mo. Pp. 450. 



This book is a striking proof of the remark- 

 able versatility of Professor Mosso, the Italian 

 physiologist. It purports to be a resume of im- 

 pressions gathered on his visit to this country 

 in 1899, but the book has a wider bearing and 

 goes quite beyond the scope of a journal of 

 travel. It is a very suggestive survey of some 

 of the most characteristic aspects of American 

 life, and Professor Mosso, who was already 

 known as a writer of unusual brilliancy and 

 cleverness in his own field of physiology, shows 

 here a decided taste for sociological investiga- 

 tions — a feature quite new in the personality of 

 the author of 'La Paura.' He is too modest 

 to consider himself anything but a dilettante 

 in the study of social facts and problems. 

 But the thoroughly scientific training of 

 Mosso's mind, his experimental habits and 

 trend of thought, his keen power of obser- 

 vation, raise the value of his sociological im- 

 promptu and give his studies of American 

 life a deeper significance, which cannot fail 

 to command the attention of the ' specialist ' 

 himself. 



The book includes eleven chapters and, as 

 an appendix, the lecture on ' Thought and 

 Motion ' delivered at Worcester, Mass. , on 

 July 7, 1899, on the 10th anniversary of the 

 foundation of Clark University. The first 

 chapter is mainly descriptive. It is a series of 

 notes taken while travelling through the coun- 

 try. Mosso, who is a fine writer, shows here 

 his characteristic qualities of vividness and bril- 

 liancy. The second is a study of the general 

 features of the jDopulation. Here the physiolo- 

 gist has his way and shows himself at every 

 step. The various aspects of the population, 

 anthropological characters, mental and moral 

 traits, the demotic composition, the birth-rate, 

 the criminal and suicidal tendencies, etc., are 

 all systematically taken up and discussed with 

 great clearness and lucidity. Mosso is struck 

 by the unmistakable evidence of nervous strain 

 exhibited by the American population, as a 

 whole. "Perhaps," he says (p. 38), " we have 

 reached in this country the maximum limit of 

 work that can be attained by the neuro-muscu- 



lar system." Mosso is a firm believer in the 

 influence of climate upon the race. 



"The transformation of the anthropological 

 characters under the influence of climate is," 

 according to Mosso, "a physiological fact that 

 cannot be doubted " (p. 75). Climate and edu- 

 cation — meaning, of course, by the latter the 

 action of social environment — are the only 

 sources of dissimilarity in men (p. 106). This 

 is the thought that runs through Chapter III., 

 in which the racial question is taken up and 

 discussed in the light of recent literature. 

 Mosso does not believe in the form of the skull 

 as being the differential element of racial 

 types and an index of the psychical tendencies 

 of each. "This is," as he puts it, " a puerile 

 form of materialism. Our present knowledge 

 of the structure and function of the nervous 

 system does not warrant our attributing such a 

 prominent importance to the form of the skull. 

 The alleged measurements of the anthropologists 

 are entirely worthless as a means of determin- 

 ing the psychical tendencies of a man or a 

 nation " (p. 80). The difference in the form of 

 the skull and in the color of the hair, upon 

 which the entire structure of Ammon and 

 Lapouge's anthropo-sociology is based, is due 

 to the combined action of altitude and tem- 

 perature — i.. e., to the climate. Inhabitants of 

 the mountains have fair hair, while inhabitants 

 of the plains have dark hair. Livi has con- 

 clusively shown that all over Italy — including 

 Sicily and Sardinia, where the so-called north- 

 ern races never reached — the mountains are 

 inhabited by fair-haired men. Since the color 

 of the hair is dependent upon the deposition 

 therein of a varying amount of pigment ulti- 

 mately derived from the blood, it is not difficult 

 to trace the connection between the climate 

 and the phenomena of oxidation which are at 

 the bottom of the production of pigmentary 

 matter. On the other hand, the dissimilarity in 

 the form of the skull, upon which so much stress 

 has been laid by anthropologists, is merely due 

 to the lack of correlation between the size of 

 the body, which is influenced by altitude and 

 temperature, and the size of the brain, which is 

 left unchanged (pp. 82-83). There are no races 

 in the old metaphysical meaning of ethnic groups 

 governed by congeuitally blind impulses. The 



