198 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



vived. Surprise has been expressed at the fact that a race 

 which is certainly physically inferior should have thus persisted. 

 If anthropological characters are only factors determining the 

 course of social evolution ; if racial characteristics alone have 

 moulded our civilisation into shape ; if, as the anthropo-socio- 

 logical school asserts, there are races of masters and races of 

 slaves, distinguished by certain well-defined anthropological 

 traits ; and if the destinies of humanity are in the hands of the 

 dolichocephalous race, who are to assert their supremacy at the 

 expense of the brachycephalous race ; if these postulates of the 

 anthropo-sociological school are accurate, the problem of the 

 persistence of the Jewish race in Europe is a problem very 

 difficult to solve. ^ But the groimds on which this theory of 



1 The anthropo-sooiologioal school traces its origin back to the Comte 

 de Gobineau, author of the remarkable Essai sur I'lnegalite des Races 

 humaines (Paris, 4 vols., 1853). The leading representatives of the school 

 to-day are M. G. Vacher de Lapouge in France, and Professor Otto Ammon 

 in Germany {vide G. Vacher de Lapouge, Les Selections sociales, Paris, 

 1896 ; L'Aryen, Paris, 1899 ; also O. Ammon, Die natiirliche Auslese beim 

 Menschen, Jena, 1893 ; Die Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre nalurlichen 

 Orundlagen : Entumrf einer Sozialanthropologie, Jena, 1900. An important 

 and valuable work is that of Ron, Beitrage zur europiiischen Rassenlcunde, 

 in Archiv fiir Rassen und Gesellschaftsbiologie, Berlin, 1905-06. The author 

 has measured upwards of eighty thousand persons in Germany and Scan- 

 dinavia.) The doctrine of the anthropo-sociological school to the effect 

 that the race factor dominates every other factor in the history of society ; 

 that the racial differences are fundamental and permanent ; and that 

 the superior race, which the anthropo-sociological school identifies with 

 the Aryan race, must jealously preserve itself from contamination by 

 intermingling, if the level of the human species is not to be degraded — 

 this doctrine, we say, has found considerable acceptance in Germany. 

 The Pangermanio party has found scientists to justify the political aims 

 of the Pangermanists in the name of anthropo-sociology. Starting from 

 the idea that the superior dolichocephalous Aryan race is the stock from 

 which the Germanic race of to-day is descended, they have endeavoured 

 to prove that the only nation in which the Aryan blood of the ancestors 

 has been preserved in comparative purity is the German nation ; from 

 this hypothesis to the corollary that the German nation is destined, by 

 reason of its anthropological superiority, to absorb in itself all the Ger- 

 manic elements which are not as yet included in the German Empire, 

 there is only a step. It is the duty of the Germans of the Empire, who 



