436 



THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY 



entertaining manner about "Some pioneers 

 in parasitology." 



HUMAN BIOLOGY 



THE AMERICAN NEGRO. A Study in 



Racial Crossing. 



By Melville J. Herskovits. 



Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 

 $1.75 5 x 7I; xiv + 9X New York 



This little book furnishes an excellent 

 summary, in readable form comprehensible 

 to the lay reader, of the results of the 

 important studies that Dr. Herskovits 

 has been making during the past four or 

 five years on the anthropology of the 

 American negro. The work has been 

 carefully and thoroughly done, and there- 

 fore the conclusions reached are worthy 

 of serious consideration. They run coun- 

 ter to a whole flock of preconceptions of 

 geneticists and eugenists. Let it first be 

 noted that Dr. Herskovits has worked 

 with "run-of-mine" negroes, chiefly in 

 Washington, D. C, in respect of whom it 

 is idle to talk about "pure" negroes, or 

 "first crosses" between white and negro. 

 "The population we have considered is 

 not the first nor even the second filial 

 generation, in the main, but is farther 

 removed from the original crossing." 



Now for the results. 



What we see is that in trait after trait the average 

 is about half-way between the averages for the White 

 population and the African, so that what we have 

 represented here is a blend, if the gross statistical 

 analysis is correct. In the second place there would 

 have to be an increase in variability if the Mendelian 

 hypothesis were operative in this case. But I need 

 not repeat the fact that the American Negro is 

 homogeneous, and that the index of this homogene- 

 ity is the low variability of trait after trait when this 

 variability is compared with that of the so-called 

 "pure" populations. Results such as these must give 

 us pause. It may be that Mendelian heredity is 

 operating in a way so complex that it cannot be 



discerned by the use of statistical analysis of adult 

 groups, although this type of material constitutes 

 by far the greatest portion of that available. When 

 the actual heredity from parents to children is 

 investigated, a new light may be thrown on the 

 situation. But the data which have gone into this 

 study of the American Negro thus far do not seem, 

 when analyzed, to show any tendency to act according 

 to the requirements of the Mendelian hypothesis. 



We heartily commend this entertaining 

 and significant little volume to our readers. 



A STUDY OF RACES IN THE ANCIENT 



NEAR EAST. 



By William H. Worrell. 



D. Appleton and Co. 

 $3.00 5I x 8|; xiv + 139 New York 

 In brief space the author of this inter- 

 esting volume, who is Associate Professor 

 of Semitics in the University of Michigan, 

 brings to bear geographic, ethnologic, 

 and linguistic evidence upon the problem 

 of the disentanglement of the knotty 

 skein of race in the Near East. At the 

 start he states that the book is the out- 

 come of a 



life-long romantic interest in race, which has been 

 fed and deepened by long contact with the Jewish 

 people of many lands. They are The Race. As I 

 stand before these faces, representing many types, 

 I fancy I see in real presence Hittite and Babylonian, 

 Canaanite and Aramaean; now all "Jews," many 

 American citizens, some eminent in modern life, 

 speaking the Germanic-Romance language of the 

 British Isles, or the medieval German of the Rhine- 

 land, or the Spagnoli and Arabic of Moorish Spain. 

 Once, I know, their forebears wrote works in Arabic, 

 and before that in Hellenistic Greek and Aramaic, 

 and before that in Hebrew. They came out of 

 Arabia, the fountain-head of Semitic speech. Behind 

 the intricacies and mysteries of Arabic lie the revela- 

 tions of ancient Akkadian and Ethiopic. But this is 

 only the beginning: The pictured monuments of 

 Egypt tell us that the most archaic Semitic speech 

 is no more than an early offshoot of a trunk whose 

 branches even now flourish all over Africa. With 

 this type of speech there went a race which by de- 

 grees we trace back to the Atlas highlands. Wc 



