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PEDAGOGICAI ANTHEOPOLOGY
BY
MARIA MONTESSOUI
AuTHOa '"'"a Mo^TESSOBI METi("T>
FREDERIC TABER COOPER
'^l ILLUSTRATIONS AND DIAGRAMS
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PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
BY
MARIA MONTESSORI
Author of "The Montessori Method'
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY
FREDERIC TABER COOPER '
WITH 16S ILLUSTRATIONS AND DIAGRAMS
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
MCMXIII
i
Copyright, 1913, by Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian
D
July, 1913
THE. MAPLE- PRESS. YORK.PA
OCI.A
3 5 114 6 V^
TO
MY MOTHER
RENILDE STOPPANI
AND MY FATHER
ALESSANDRO MONTESSORI
ON THE OCCASION OF THE FORTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THEIR UNCLOUDED UNION, I DEDICATE THIS ^ BOOK, FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT OF LOVE AND
"%» CONTENTMENT WITH WHICH THEY
HAVE INSPIRED ME
PREFACE
For some time past much has been said in Italy regarding Pedagogical Anthropology; but I do not think that until now any attempt has been made to define a science corresponding to such a title; that is to say, a method that systematises the positive study of the pupil for pedagogic purposes and with a view to establishing philosophic principles of education.
As soon as anthropology annexes the adjective, ''pedagogical," it should base its scope upon the fundamental conception of a possible amelioration of man, founded upon the positive knowl- edge of the laws of human life. In contrast to general anthro- pology which, starting from a basis of positive data founded on observation, mounts toward philosophic problems regarding the origin of man, pedagogic anthropology, starting from an analogous basis of observation and research, must rise to philosophic con- ceptions regarding the future destiny of man from the biological point of view. The study of congenital anomalies and of their biological and social origin, must undoubtedly form a part of pedagogical anthropology, in order to afford a positive basis for a universal human hygiene, whose sole field of action must be the school; but an even greater importance is assumed by the study of defects of growth in the normal man; because the battle against these evidently constitutes the practical avenue for a wide regen- eration of mankind.
If in the future a scientific pedagogy is destined to rise, it will devote itself to the education of men already rendered physically better through the agency of the allied positive sciences, among which pedagogic anthropology holds first place.
The present-day importance assumed by all the sciences cal- culated to regenerate education and its environment, the school, has profound social roots and is forced upon us as the necessary path toward, further progress; in fact the transformation of the outer environment through the mighty development of experimen-
vii
viii PREFACE
tal sciences during the past century, must result in a correspond- ingly transformed man; or else civilisation must come to st halt before the obstacle offered by a human race lacking in organic strength and character.
The present volume comprises the lectures given by me in the University of Rome, during a period of four years, all of which were diligently preserved by one of my students, Signor Franceschetti. My thanks are due to my master, Professor Giuseppe Sergi who, after having urged me to turn my anthropological studies in the direction of the school, recommended me as a specialist in the subject; and my free university course for students in the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Medicine was established, in pursuance of his advice, by the Pedagogic School of the University of Rome. The volume also contains the pictures used in the form of lantern slides to illustrate the lectures, pictures taken in part from various works of research mentioned in this volume. Acknowledgment is gratefully made to the scientists and scholars whose work is thus referred to.
I have divided my subject into ten chapters, according to a special system: namely, that each chapter is complete in itself — for example, the first chapter, which is very long, contains an out- line of general biology, and at the same time biological and social generalisations concerning man considered from our point of view as educators, and thus furnishes a complete organic conception which the remainder of the book proceeds to analyse, one part at a time; the chapter on the pelvis, on the other hand, is exceed- ingly^ short, but it completely covers the principles relating to this particular part, because they lend themselves to such condensed treatment.
Far from assuming that I have written a definitive work, it is only at the request of my students and publisher that I have con- sented to the publication of these lectures, which represent a modest effort to justify the faith of the master who urged me to devote my services as a teacher to the advancement of the school.
Maria Montessori.
CONTENTS
( The figures in parenthesis refer to the number of the page)
INTRODUCTION
MODERN TENDENCIES OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND THEIR RELATION TO PEDAGOGY
The Old Anthropology(l)— Modern Anthropology (4)— De Giovanni and Physiologi- cal Anthropology (11) — Sergi and Pedagogic Anthropology (14) — Morselli and Scientific Philosophy (21) — Importance of Method in Experimental Sciences (23) — Objective Collecting of Single Facts (24) — Passage from Analysis to Synthesis (26) — Method to be followed in the present Course of Lectures(30) — ^Limits of Pedagogical Anthropology (34). The School as a Field of Research(37).
CHAPTER I
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY
The Material Substratum of Life(38) — Synthetic Concept of the Individual in Biology(38) — Formation of Multicellular Organisms(42) — Theories of Evolu- tion(4€) — Phenomena of Heredity(50) — Phenomena of Hybridism(51) — Men- del's Laws (51).
THE FORM AND TYPES OF STATURE
The Form(67)^Fundamental Canons regarding the Form (74) — Types of Stature, Macroscclia and BrachysceUa; their Physiological Significance (75) — Types of Stature in relation to Race(77), Sex(80), and Age(81) — Pedagogic Considera- tions(88) — Abnormal Types of Stature in their relation to Moral Training(91) — Macrosceha and Brachysceha in Pathological Individuals (De Giovanni's Hypo- sthenic and Hypersthenic Types) (95) — Types of Stature in Emotional Criminals and in Parasites(lOl) — Extreme types of Stature among the Extra-social: Nan- ism and Gigantism (103) — Summary of Types of Stature(105).
THE STATURE
The Stature as a Linear Index (106) — Limits of Stature according to Race(108) — Stat- ure in relation to Sex(lll) — Variations in Stature with Age, according to Sex(118) — Variations due to Mechanical Causes(119) — Variations due to Adaptation in connection with various Causes, Social, Physical, Psychic, Pathological, etc. (124) — Effect of Light, Heat, Electricity(132) — Variations in Growth according to the Season(138) — Pathogenesis of Infantilism (151) — Stature affected by Syphilis (157), Tuberculosis (158), Malaria(160), Pe]lagra(161), Rickets(164)— Moral and Pedagogical Considerations(168) — Summary of Stature(170).
THE WEIGHT
The Weight considered as Total Measure of Mass(172) — Weight of Child at Birth (173)— Loss of Weight (176)— Specific Gravity of Body(178)— Index of Weight(181).
ix
X CONTENTS
CHAPTER II
CRANIOLOGY
The Head and Cranium(187) — The Face(188) — Characteristics of the Human Cra- nium (191) — Evolution of the Forehead; Inferior Skull Caps; the Pithocanthro- pus; the Neanderthal Man(192) — Morphological Evolution of the Cranium through different Periods of Life(197) — Normal Forms of Cranium(202) — the Cephalic Index (207)— Volume of Cranium (220)— Development of Brain (220)— Extreme Variations in Volume of Brain(229) — Nomenclature of Cranial Capac- ity (242) — Chemistry of the Brain (247) — Human Intenigence(252) — Influence of Mental Exercise (254) — Pretended Cerebral Inferiority of Woman (256) — Limits of the Face (259)— Human Character of the Face (260)— Normal Visage (262)— Prognathism(268)— Evolution of the Face(272)— Facial Expression(276)— the Neck (282).
CHAPTER III
THE THORAX
Anatomical Parts of the Thorax(281) — Physiological and Hygienic Aspect of Thorax (286)— Spirometry (288)— Growth of Thorax(294)— Dimensions of Thorax in relation to Stature(295)— Thoracic Index (297)— Shape of Thorax (299)— Anoma- lies of Shape(301) — Pedagogical Considerations: the Evil of School Benches(302).
CHAPTER IV
THE PELVIS
Anatomical Parts of the Pelvis (304) — Growth of Pelvis (306) — Shape of Pelvis in relation to Child-birth (307).
CHAPTER V
THE LIMBS
Anatomy of the Limbs (308) — Growth of Limbs (309) — Malformations: Flat-foot, Opposable Big Toe(311), Curvature of Leg, Club-foot (3 12)— The Hand(312)— Cheiromancy and Physiognomy; the Hand in Figurative Speech; High and Low Types of Hand(312) — Dimensions of Hand(315) — Proportions of Fingers(316) —the Nails(317)— Anomalies of the Hand (3 17)— Lines of the Palm(318)— Papil- lary Lines (3 19).
CHAPTER VI
THE SKIN AND PIGMENTS
Pigmentation and Cutaneous Apparatus (320) — Pigmentation of theHair(323) — of the Skin (325)— of the Iris(325)— Form of the Hair (327)— Anomalies of Pigment: Icthyosis, Birth-marks, Freckles, etc. (329) — Anomalies of Hair (330).
MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF CERTAIN ORGANS (STIGMATA)
Synoptic Chart of Stigmata(332) — Anomahes of the Eye(333) — of the Ear(334) — of the Nose(335)— of the Teeth(336)— Importance of the Study of Morphology (338) — Significance of the Stigmata of Degeneration (342) — Distribution of Malforma- tions (344) — Individual Number of Malformations (347) — Origin of Malforma- tions(355) — Humanity's Dependence upon Woman(357) — Moral and Pedagogi- cal Problems within the School(358).
CONTENTS xi
CHAPTER VII
TECHNICAL PART
The Form(361)— Measurement of Stature(362)— the Anthropometer(363) — the Sitting Stature(365)— Total Spread of Arms (367)— Thoracic Perimeter(368)— Weight(368) — Ponderal Index(368) — Head and Cranium(369) — Cranioscopy (370)— Craniometry(373)— Cephahc Index (376)— Measurements of Thorax(385) —of Abdomen (386).
THE PERSONAL ERROR
Need of Practical Experience in Anthropology (387) — Average Personal Error (388) — Susceptibility to Suggestion (389).
CHAPTER VIII STATISTICAL METHODOLOGY Mean Averages(391) — Seriation(396) — Quetelet's Binomial Curve(398).
CHAPTER IX
THE BIOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE PUPIL AND HIS ANTECEDENTS
Biographic Histories (404) — Remote Antecedents (406) — Near Biopathological Ante- cedents (407) — Sociological Antecedents (411 ) — School Records (411) — Biographic Charts(422) — Psychic Tests(425) — Typical Biographic History of an Idiot Boy(434) — Proper Treatment of Defective Pupils(446) — Rational Medico-peda- gogical Method(448).
CHAPTER X
THE APPLICATION OF BIOMETRY TO ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE PURPOSE OF DETERMINING THE MEDIAL MAN
Theory of the Medial Man(454) — Importance of Seriation(455) — De Helguere's Curves(460)— Viola's Medial Man(463)— Human Hybridism (466)— the Medial Intellectual and Moral Man(469) — Sexual Morality(473) — Sacredness of Mater- nity (474) — Biological Liberty and the New Pedagogy (477).
Table of Mean Proportions of the Body According to Age (480). Tables for Calculating the Cephalic Index (485). Tables for Calculating the Ponderal Index(491). General Index:
A. Index of Names(501).
B. Index of Subjects(503).
INTRODUCTION
THE MODERN TENDENCIES OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE RELATION THAT THEY BEAR TO PEDAGOGY
Human Hygiene
The Old Anthropology. — Anthropology was defined by Broca as ''the natural history of man," and was intended to be the appli- cation of the "zoological method" to the study of the human species.
As a matter of fact, as with all positive sciences, the essential characteristic of Anthropology is its ''method." We could not say, if we wished to speak quite accurately, that "Anthropology is the study of man" ; because the greater part of acquirable knowl- edge has for its subject the human race or the individual human being; philosophy studies his origin, his essential nature, his characteristics; linguistics, history and representative art inves- tigate the collective phenomena of physiological and social orders, or determine the morphological characteristics of the idealised human body.
Accordingly, what characterises Anthropology is not its sub- ject: man; but rather the method by which it proposes to study him.
The selfsame procedure which zoology, a branch of the natural sciences, applies to the study of animals, anthropology must apply to the study of man; and by doing so it enrolls itself as a science in the field of nature.
Zoology has a well-defined point of departure, that clearly distinguishes it from the other allied sciences: it studies the living animal. Consequently, it is an eminently synthetic science, because it cannot proceed apart from the individual, which repre- sents in itself a sum of complex morphological and psychic char- acteristics, associated with the species; and which furthermore, during life, exhibits certain special distinguishing traits resulting from instincts, habits, migration and geographical distribution.
1
2 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Zoology consequently includes a vast but well-defined field. Fundamentally, it is a descriptive science, and when the general character of the individual living creatures has been determined, it proceeds to draw comparisons between them, distinguishing genus and species, and thus working toward a classification. Down to the time of Linnaeus, these were its limits; but since the studies of Lamarck and Charles Darwin, it has gone a step further, and has proceeded to investigate the origin of species, an example that was destined to be followed by botany and biology as a whole, which is the study of living things.
When anthropology attained, under Broca, the dignity of a branch of the natural sciences, the evolutionary theory already held the field, and man had begun to be studied as an animal in his relation to species of the lower orders. But, just as in zoology, the fundamental part of anthropology was descriptive; and the description of the morphology of the body was divided, according to the method followed, into anthropology , or the method of inspec- tion, and anthropometry, or the method of measurements.
By these means, many problems important to the biological side of the subject were solved — such, for instance, as racial characteristics — and a classification of ''the human races" was achieved through the evidences afforded by comparative studies.
But the descriptive part of anthropology is not limited to the inspection and measurement of the body; on the contrary, just as in zoology, it is extended to include the habits of the individual living being; that is to say, in the case of man, the language, the manners and customs (data that determine the level of civilisation), emigration and the consequent intermixture of races in the orig- inal formation of nations, thus constituting a special branch of science properly known by the name of ethnology.
In this manner, while still adhering rigorously to zoological methods, anthropology found itself compelled to throw out nu- merous collateral branches into widely different fields, such as those of linguistics and archaeology; because man is a speaking animal and a social animal.
One strictly anthropological problem is that of the origin of man, and its ultimate analogy with that of the other animal species. Hence the comparative studies between man and the anthropoid apes; while palseontological discoveries of pre-human forms, such as the pithecanthropus, were just so many arguments
INTRODUCTION 3
calculated to bring the human species within the scheme of a biological philosophy, based upon evolution, which held its own, for nearly half a century, on the battle-ground of natural sciences, under the glorious leadership of Darwin.
Yet, notwithstanding that it offered studies and problems of direct interest to man, anthropology failed to achieve popularity. During that half century (the second half of the Nineteenth), which beheld the scientific branches of biology multiply through- out the entire field of analytical research, from histology to bio- chemistry, and succeeded especially in making a practical appli- cation of them in medicine. Anthropology failed to raise itself from the status of a pure and aristocratic, in other words, a super- fluous science, a status that prevented it from ranking among the sciences of primary importance. As a matter of fact, while zool- ogy is a required study in the universities. Anthropology still remains an elective study, which in Italy is relegated to three or four universities at most. The epoch of materialistic philosophy and analytical investigation could naturally hardly be expected to prove a field of victory for man, the intelligent animal, and nature's most splendid achievement in construction.
The impressive magnificence of this thought, that bursts like pent-up waters from the results of positive research into man con- sidered as a living individual, was forced to await the patient preparation of material on which to build, such as the gathering of partial and disorganised facts, which were accumulated through rigorous and minute analyses, conducted under the guidance of the experimental sciences. It was in this manner that anthro- pology slowly evolved a method and, by doing so, raised itself to the rank of a science', without ever once being" utilised for prac- tical purposes or recognised as necessary as a supplemental or integral element of other sciences.
One branch of learning which might have utiHsed the important scientific discoveries regarding the antiquity of man, his nature considered as an animal, his first efforts as a labourer and a member of society, is pedagogy.
What could be more truly instructive and educative than to describe to children that first heroic Robinson Crusoe, primitive man, cast away on this vast island, the earth, lost in the midst of the universe? Mankind, weak and naked, without iron, because it still remained mysteriously hidden in the bowels of the earth, without fire because they had not yet discovered the means of pro- curing it; stones were their only weapons of defense against the ferocious and gigantic beasts that roared on all sides of them in the forests. The rude, splin-
4 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
tered stone, the first handiwork of intelligent man, his first instrument and his first weapon, could be prepared solely from one kind of mineral, of which the local deposit began to fail — a state of things which, let us suppose, occurred on some ocean island. Thereupon the men constructed a small boat from the bark of trees, and sped over the waters, in search of the needed stone, passing from island to island, with scanty nourishment, without lights in the night-time, and without a guide.
These marvelous accounts ought to be easily understood by children, and to awaken in them an admiration for their own kinship with humanity, and a profound sense of indebtedness to the mighty power of labour, which to-day is rendered so productive and so easy by our advanced civilisation, in which the environment, thanks to the works of man, has done so much to make our lives enjoyable.
But pedagogy, no less than the other branches of learning, has disdained to accept any contribution from anthropology; it has failed to see man as the mighty wrestler, at close grips with environment, man the toiler and transmuter, man the hero of creation. Of the history of human evolution, not a single ray sheds light upon the child and adolescent, the coming generation. The schools teach the history of wars — the history of disasters and crimes — which were pain- ful necessities in the successive passages through civilisations created by the labour and slow perfectioning of humanity; but civilisation itself, which abides in the evolution of labour arid of thought, remains hidden from our children in the darkness of silence.
Let us compare the appearance of man upon the earth to the discovery of the motive power of steam and to the subsequent appearance of railways as a factor in our social life. The railway has no limits of space, it overruns the world, unresting and unconscious, and by doing so promotes the brotherhood of men, of nations, of business interests. Let us suppose that we should choose to remain silent about the work performed by our railways and their social signifi- cance in the world to-day, and should teach our children only about the accidents, after the fashion of the newspapers, and keep their sensitive minds lingering in the presence of shattered and motionless heaps of carriages, amid the cries of anguish and the bleeding limbs of the victims.
The children would certainly ask themselves what possible connection there could be between such a disaster and the progress of civilisation. Well, this is precisely what we do when, from all the prehistoric and historic ages of humanity, we teach the children nothing but a series of wars, oppressions, tyrannies and betrayals; and, equipped with such knowledge, we push them out, in all their ignorance, into the century of the redemption of labour and the triumph of uni- versal peace, telling them that "history is the teacher of life."
Modern Anthropology : Cesar e Lombroso and Criminal Anthro- pology. The Anthropological Principles of Moral Hygiene. — The credit rests with Italy for having rescued Anthropology from a sort of scientific Olympus, and led it by new paths to the perform- ance of an eminent and practical service.
It was about the year 1855 that Cesare Lombroso applied the
INTRODUCTION 5
anthropological method first to the study of the insane, and then to that of criminals, having perceived a similarity or relationship between these two categories of abnormal individuals. The observation and measurement of clinical subjects, studied especially in regard to the cranium by anthropometric methods, led the young innovator to discover that the mental derangements of the insane were accompanied by morphological and physical abnor- malities that bore witness to a profound and congenital alteration of the entire personality. Accordingly, for the purposes of diagno- sis, Lombroso came to adopt a somatic basis. And his anthropo- logical studies of criminals led him to analogous results.
The method employed was in all respects similar to the natural- istic method which anthropology had taken over from zoology; that is to say, the description of the individual subject considered chiefly in his somatic or corporeal personality, but also in his physiological and mental aspect; the study of his responsiveness to his environment, and of his habits {manners and customs); the grouping of subjects under types according to their dominant characteristic {classification) ; and finally, the study of their origin, which, in this case, meant a sociological investigation into the genesis of degenerate and abnormal types. Thus, since the prin- ciples of the Lombrosian doctrine spread with a precocious rapidity, it is a matter of common knowledge that criminals present anoma- lies of form, or rather morphological deviations associated with degeneration and known under the name of stigmata (now called malformations), which, when they occur together in one and the same subject, confer upon him a wellnigh characteristic aspect, notably different from that of the normal individual; in other words, they stamp him a^ belonging to an inferior type, which, ac- cording to Lombroso's earlier interpretation, is a reversion toward the lower orders of the human race (negroid and mongoloid types), as evidenced by anomalies of the vital organs, or internal animal- like characteristics (pithecoids) ; and that such stigmata were often accompanied by a predisposition to maladies tending to shorten life. Side by side with his somatic chart, Lombroso pains- takingly prepared a physio-pathological chart of criminal subjects, based upon a study of their sensibility, their grasp of ideas, their social and ethical standards, their thieves' jargon and tattoo- marks, their handwriting and literary productions. 'I
And, by deducing certain common characteristics from these
6 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
complex charts, he distinguished, in his classic work. Delinquent Man, a variety of types, such as the morally insane, the epileptic delinquent, the delinquent from impulse or passion (irresistible impulsion), the insane delinquent, and the occasional delinquent.
In this way, he succeeded in classifying a series of types — what we might call sub-species — diverging from the somatic and psycho-moral charts of normal men. But the common bio- pathological foundation of such types (with the exception of the last) was degeneration. We may well agree with Morselli that, in many parts of his treatise, Lombroso completed and amplified Morel, whose classic work, A Study of the Degeneration of the Human Species, was published in France at a time when Lombroso had hardly started upon his anthropological researches.
Both of these great teachers based their doctrine upon a naturalistic concept of man, and then proceeded to consider him, through all his anomalies and perversions, in relation to that extraneous factor, his environment. Morel, indeed, considers the social causes of degeneration, that is to say, of progressive organic impoverishment, as more important than the individual phenomena; they act upon posterity and tend to create a human variety deviating from the normal type. Such causes may be summed up as including whatever tends to the organic detriment of civilised man: such (in the first rank) as alcoholism, poisoning associated with professional industries (metallic poisons), or with lack of nutriment (pellagra), conditions endemic in certain locali- ties (goitre), infective maladies (malaria, tuberculosis), denutrition (surmenage). It may be said that whatever produces prolonged suffering, or whatever we class under the term vices, or even the neglect of our duties, chief among which is that of working (para- sitism of the rich), or any of the causes which exhaust, or paralyse, or perturb our normal functions, are causes of degeneration, of impoverishment of the species.
Such is the doctrine which underlies the etiological concept of abnormal personality in psychiatry as well as in criminology, or points the way to its bio-social sources.
Accordingly, just as general Anthropology sought to investigate the origins of races or that of the human species in the very roots of life, so criminal Anthropology searches the origins of defective personality in its social surroundings.
The ethical problems which are raised by such a doctrine
\,
INTRODUCTION 7
cannot fail to be of interest to us. The Lombrosian theories, by raising these problems, have not only shaken the foundations of penal law, but have even brought about a moral renovation of conscience. We will leave to the jurists the great civic labor resulting from having brought the individual as well as the crime under consideration, in relation to the social phenomenon of delinquency — in other words, of having substituted an anthro- pological for a speculative attitude. Whether the delinquent should be cured, or simply isolated, or even subjected to punish- ment; whether the prison should be transformed into an asylum for the criminal insane ; whether the penal laws should be reformed on principles of a higher order of civil morality : these are problems which interest us only secondarily.
What does interest us directly as educators is the necessity of laying our course in accordance with the standard of social morality which such a doctrine reveals and imposes upon us: since it is our duty to prepare the conscience of the rising generation. And, furthermore, to consider whether the organisation of our schools and of their methods is in conformity with such social progress.
If we cast a general glance at social ethics, from the primitive beginnings of human intercourse, we witness the evolution of the vendetta. There was, first, the individual vendetta. It was a form of primordial justice, with which were associated the senti- ments of dignity, honour and solidarity; the injured party avenged himself by slaying; and the family of the slain retaliated by a new vendetta against the family of the slayer; and thus from generation to generation the tragic heritage continued to be handed down. Even now, in certain districts of civilised countries there exist survivals of these primitive forms of justice. In such cases, the slayer is held to be, not only honourable but virtuous. Analogously, in course of time, the individual vendetta, regulated by special formalities, developed into the duel for a point of honour.
At a more advanced period, in the course of the organisation of society, the task of vengeance was taken away from the indi- vidual, and the social administration of justice was established. Thereafter, the act of an offender was punished by the people collectively, and the victims of the act had no other recompense from society than that of a sense of satisfied hatred.
But throughout all civil progress, from the most primitive forms of society down to our own times, there persisted, as a
8 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
fundamental principle, the concept of vengeance, coupled with the two great moral principles, individually and collectively, of human society: honour and justice. The naturalistic concept introduced by the Lombrosian doctrine, namely, living man entering as a concrete reality into the midst of abstract moral principles, shatters this association of ideas, and by so doing prepares the way for a new order of things — which is not a progess of evolution, but the beginning of an epoch. Vengeance disappears in the new conception of the defense of society and of an active campaign for the progress of humanity; and it ushers in an epoch of redemp- tion and of solidarity, in which all limitations of human brother- hood are swept away.
The theories of Morel and Lombroso have resulted in calling the attention of civilised man to all the types of the physiologically inferior; the mentally deficient, epileptics, delinquents; shedding light upon their pathological personality, and transforming into interest and pity the contempt and neglect that were formerly the portion of such creatures. In this way science has accom- plished in their behalf a work analogous to that of certain saints on behalf of lepers and sufferers from cancer in the middle ages. At that epoch, and even down to the beginning of modern times, the sick were abandoned to themselves and languished, covered with sores, in the midst of the horrors of infection; lepers were universally shunned, and their bodies decomposed without succor. It was only when these miserable beings began to awaken pity, in the place of loathing and repulsion, and to attract the charity of saints, instead of spreading panic among egoists and cowards, that the care of the sick began upon a vast scale, with the founda- tion of hospitals, the progress of medicine, and later of hygiene.
To-day those purulent plague-spots of the middle ages no longer exist; and infection is being combated with progressive success, in the triumph of physical health.
Yet, we are standing to-day on the selfsame level as the middle ages, in respect to moral plague-spots and infections; the phe- nomenon of criminality spreads without check or succor, and up to yesterday it aroused in us nothing but repulsion and loathing. But now that science has laid its finger upon this moral fester, it demands the cooperation of all mankind to combat it.
Accordingly we find ourselves in the epoch of hospitals for the morally diseased, the century of their treatment and cure; we have
INTRODUCTION 9
initiated a social movement toward the triumph of morality. We educators must not forget that we have inaugurated the epoch of spiritual health; because I beheve that it is we who are destined to be the true physicians and nurses of this new cure. From the middle ages until now, the science of medicine has slowly been evolving for us the principles required to guarantee our bodily health; but we know very well that while cleanliness and hygiene are signs of civilisation, it is its moral standard that establishes its level.
This moral solidarity is something which it is our duty to under- stand thoroughly, if we wish to undertake the noble task of edu- cators in the Twentieth Century, which was prepared in advance by the intensive intellectual activity of the century of science.
Granting the social phenomenon of crime, we ought to ask our- selves : where does the fault lie? If we are to acquit the individual criminal of responsibility, it falls back necessarily upon the social community through which the causes of degeneration and disease have filtered. Accordingly, it is we, every one of us, who are at fault : or rather, we are beginning to awaken to a consciousness that it is a sin to foster or to tolerate such social conditions as make possible the suffering, the vices, the errors that lead to physiolog- ical pauperism, to pathology, to the degeneration of posterity. The idea is not a new one : all great truths were perceived in every age by the elect few; the fundamental principles of the doctrine of Lombroso are to be already found in Greek philosophy and in that of Christ; Aristotle, in his belief that there is some one par- ticular organism corresponding to each separate manifestation of nature, foreshadows the concept of the correspondence between the morphological and psychic personality; and St. John Chrisostom expounds the principle of moral solidarity in the collective respon- sibility of society, when he says: ''you will render account, not only of your own salvation, but of that of all mankind; whoever prays ought to feel himself burdened with the interests of the entire human race."
Now, if it is not yet in our power to achieve a social reform based on the eradication of degenerative causes — since society can be perfected only gradually — it is nevertheless within our power to prepare the conscience for acceptance of the new morality, and by educational means to help along the civil progress which science has revealed to us. The honest man, the worthy man, the
10 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
man of honour, is not he who avenges himself; but he who works for something outside himself, for the sake of society at large, in order to purify it of its evils and its sins, and advance it on its path of future progress. In this way, even though we fail to prepare the material environment, we shall have prepared efficient men.
In addition to this momentous principle of social ethics, the Lombrosian doctrines confront us squarely with the philosophic question of liberty of action, the controverted question of Stuart Mill, namely that of ''free will." The libertarians admit the freedom of the will as one of the noblest of human prerogatives, on which the responsibility for our acts depends; the determinists recognise that the act of volition obeys certain predetermined causes. Now the Lombrosian theories find these causes, not after the fashion of the Pythagoreans, in cosmic laws or astrology, but in the constitution of the organism, thus serving as a powerful illus- tration of that physiological determinism, under whose guidance modern positive philosophy draws its inspiration.*
In the case of criminality, the actions of the degenerate delin- quent are dependent upon a multiplicity of internal factors, that are almost necessarily governed by special predispositions. But, also in accordance with the Lombrosian doctrine, there are external factors which concur in determining acts of volition, factors relating to the environment, studied in accordance with rather vast conceptions: the actions of the individual are determined in advance by that social intercourse in which the great phenomena of any given civilisation have their necessary origin — phenomena such as crime, prostitution, the grade of culture accessible to the majority, the character of industrial products, the limits of general mortality. Now, just as there are necessary fluctuations in the tables of mortality, so also there are fluctuations in the quantity and quality of those individual phenomena that are looked upon as crimes: and in the one case no less than in the other, those who are predisposed are the ones in whom occurs the necessary outbreak of phenomena having their origin in society.
This constitutes in criminology, as well as in psychiatry, the re- sultant of all etiological concepts, pertaining to the interpretation of individual phenomena. It is precisely the same concept as that so exhaustively demonstrated by Quetelet, with the aid of European statistics, in his Social Physics, and it has come to represent in
* From a work by E. Morselli: Cesare Lombroso and Scientific Philosophy.
INTRODUCTION 11
modern science that fundamental concept which was to be found in all the great religions, of the dependence of the individual upon a governing force that is superior to him. This interpretation of individual phenomena cannot be ignored in the great problems of education; because the more literally we interpret the doctrine here set forth, just so much the less trust must be placed in the efficacy of education as a modifying influence upon personality, while it will acquire new importance as a co-worker in the interpre- tation of social epochs and individual activities, over which it should exercise a watchful guidance.
But meanwhile it is of interest to us to note how the anthro- pological movement, introduced with great simplicity of method, without any scientific or philosophical preconceptions, has led the investigations of psychiatry into vast and unsuspected fields of social ethics, bringing into practice fundamental reforms, analo- gous to those relating to penal law.
Achille De Giovanni and Physiological Anthropology; Anthro- pological Principles of Physical Hygiene. — Another practical devel- opment of anthropology is that instituted by Professor De Gio- vanni, who has introduced into his medical clinic at Padua the anthropological method in the clinical examination of patients. He applies the well-known naturalistic procedure, namely, the discription of individuals, their classification into types, according to common fundamental characteristics, and the etiological study of their personality. But while Lombroso took note of malforma- tions solely in relation to other symptoms of degeneration, De Giovanni has established a strictly physiological basis for his investigations. Accordingly, he considers the human individual in his entirety, as a functionating organism,, and he regards all inharmonious bodily proportions as signifying a necessary predis- position to certain determined forms of illness. With this end in view, he does not concern himself about single malformations, such for example as prognathism, the frontal angle, etc., but rather with the general relations of development between the bust which contains the organs essential to vegetative life, and the limbs; and from the external morphology of the bust, determined by measure- ments, he seeks to establish the reciprocal relations in development within the visceral cavities: 'Hhe proportions of the human body depend upon the development of its organs; and equally with its proportions, the whole physiological strength of the body depends
12 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
upon its organs taken collectively." Whoever has a defective chest capacity not only possesses a smaller allowance of organs fitted for respiration and circulation of the blood, but as a result of such anomaly of development he is also predisposed to at- tacks of special maladies, such for example as chronic catarrh of the bronchial tubes or pulmonary tuberculosis. Whoever, on the contrary, is over-developed in abdominal dimensions, will be sub- ject to disturbances of the digestive system and of the liver. In his classic work, Morphology of the Human Body, De Giovanni proceeds to elaborate a doctrine of temperaments, and of their several predispositions to disease, the tendency of which is to transfer the basis of medicine from a study of diseases to that of the individual patients, and to revive in modern days the ancient concepts of the Greek school of medicine, which from the time of Hippocrates and Galen drew up admirable charts of the funda- mental physical types. In place of the ancient classification of temperaments into nervous, sanguine, bilious and lymphatic, we have to-day a,s substitutes, according to the school of De Giovanni, morphological types that are very nearly equivalent, and in which the predominant disorders are respectively diseases of the heart, the nervous system, the liver and the lungs.
In short, the result of this theory has been to establish an internal factor of predisposition to disease, analogous to that established by Lombroso as a predisposition to the phenomena of crime. And even here the mesogenic factors, that is, the influence of environment, must be taken into consideration: but environ- ment acts equally upon all individuals : nearly everyone encounters, in his surroundings, that nerve-strain which leads to cardiac disorders and to neurasthenia; almost everyone encounters the bacilli of tuberculosis; the causes of general mortality are dictated by the very conditions of civilisation. But among the vast major- ity who pass unharmed along the insidious paths of adaptation, only a few fall victims to the particular disease to which some spe- cial anomaly of their organism predisposes them. In this way we can understand how it happens that certain ones have reason to dread a cold that will develop into bronchitis, and others on the contrary must guard themselves from errors in diet which will lead to intestinal disorders.
The part of De Giovanni's theory which is of special interest is that which leads to a consideration of the ontogenetic development
INTRODUCTION 13
in relation to the anomalies of the physio-morphological personal- ity: "At every epoch of life this principle is applicable: Namely, that the reason for a special predisposition to disease is to be found in a special organic morphology. The individual is in a ceaseless state of transformation, and consequently at different periods of his life he may show a susceptibility to different diseases." A person who is predisposed to suffer continually from some com- plaint during his adult years, was usually unwell during the greater part of his childhood, although from some other disease; and with this as a basis, a scientific system of observation could speak prophetically regarding the physio-pathological destiny of a child. It is known, for example, that children subject to scrofula are predisposed to arrive at maturity with an undeveloped chest and a tendency to pulmonary tuberculosis.
From our point of view as educators, the doctrine of tempera- ments, and of their respective predispositions to disease, offers a deep interest, the nature of which is made evident by the author of the theory himself : for he points out that the period of childhood is the one best fitted in which to combat the abnormal predisposi- tions of the organism, wisely guiding its development, to the final end of achieving an ideal of health, which depends upon the har- mony of form and consequently of functions, in other words, upon the full attainment of physical beauty.
Here also, as in the Lombrosian doctrines, etiology fulfils the lofty task of throwing light upon the causal links between the bio- sociologic causes and the congenital anomalies of the physiological personality. The hereditary tendencies to disease, the errors of sexual hygiene, especially those regarding maternity, reveal to us the principal causes of that accumulation of imperfections that oppress and deform the average normal human being. It is be- cause of such errors and such ignorance that hardly any of us attain that harmonic beauty that would render us immune to the treacheries of environment, and enable us to achieve, in the triumphant security of good health, our normal biological development.
It is not too much to say, that it is etiology which, applied to the Lombrosian doctrines, reveals the faults of society, the sins of the world, and, applied to the theories of De Giovanni, reveals its errors; and that from the two together there results a sort of ethical guide leading toward the supreme ideal of the
2
14 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
purification of the world and the perfectionment of the human species. These are ideals which were in part cherished by the Greeks, who made their system of education the basis of their physical develop- ment. Such physiological doctrines are precisely what we also need to round out our plan for a moral education.
Giuseppe Sergi and Pedagogic Anthropology: Anthropological Bases of Human Hygiene. — It is also an Italian to whom we owe that practical extension of anthropology that leads us straight into the field of pedagogy. It was my former teacher, Giuseppe Sergi, who, as early as 1886, defended with the ardor of a prophet the new scientific principle of studying the pupils in our schools by methods prescribed by anthropology. Like the scientists who preceded him, he was thus led to substitute (in the field of pedagogy) the human individual taken from actual life, in place of general principles or abstract philosophical ideas.
As a matter of fact, while the doctrines of Lombroso and De Giovanni are profoundly reformatory, they nevertheless offer us nothing more substantial than certain new ideals of morality and social improvement. But the really practical field in which these ideals might in a large measure be realised is the school.
What progress would result for humanity if, on the basis of these new ethical principles, we contented ourselves with trans- forming our prisons into insane asylums? Such scanty fruit might well be compared to the mercy of that mediaeval Icrdling who, out of consideration for a gentleman, commuted his sentence from hanging to decapitation. And scanty fruit would also be reaped by the science of medicine if, in its new anthropological develop- ment, it should content itself merely with diagnosing the personal- ity of the patient, in addition to the disease; that is to say, for example, if, instead of telling a patient that his attack of bronchitis would be cured within twenty days, it should go on to predict, on the basis of the morphology of his body, that he would infallibly fall ill every year, until such time as pulmonary tuberculosis should put a fatal ending to his days.
On the contrary, behind the light of ideality that shimmers through and across these doctrines, we perceive our plain duty to trace out a path that will lead to a regeneration of humanity. If some practical line of action is to result, it will undoubtedly have to be exerted upon humanity in the course of development, in other words, at that period of life when the organism, being still in the
INTRODUCTION 15
course of formation, may be effectively directed and consequently corrected in its mode of growth.
Accordingly, the possible solution of the most momentous social problems, such as those of criminality, predisposition to disease, and degeneration, may be hoped for only within the limits of that space which society sets aside for guiding the new genera- tions in their development.
In the school, we have hitherto retained, almost as a principle of justice, a leveling uniformity among the pupils: an abstract equality which seeks to guide all these separate childish individu- alities toward a single type which cannot be called an idealised type, because it does not represent a standard of perfection, but is on the contrary a non-existent philosophical abstraction: the Child. Educators are prepared for their practical services to childhood, by studies based upon this abstract infantile personality; and they enter upon their active work in school with the precon- ception that they must discover in every pupil a more or less faith- ful incarnation of the said type; and thus, year after year, they delude themselves with the idea that they have understood and educated the child. Now, this supposed uniformity cannot exist in the children of a human race so varied that it can produce, at the selfsame time, a Musolino* and a Luccheni,* a Guglielmo Marconi and a Giosue Carducci. All the different social types of men who labor with their hands and with their brains, the transformers of their environment, the producers of wealth, the directors of governments, equally with the undistinguished crowd of parasites, the enemies of society, all lived together in childhood, sitting side by side, upon the same school benches.
It was in 1898 that the first Italian Pedagogical Congress was held in Turin, and was attended by about three thousand educators. Under the spur of a new passion, that made me foresee the future mission and transformation of a chosen social class, setting forth upon a glorious task of redemption — the class of educators — I attended the Congress. I was at that time an interloper, because the subsequent felicitous union between medicine and pedagogy still remained a thing undreamed of, in the thoughts of that period. We had reached the third day of our sessions, and were all awaiting with interest an address by Professor Ildebrando Bencivenni, who was announced to speak upon the theme of "The School that
*MusoLiNO was a brigand, and Luccheni an anarchist and regicide.
16 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Educates." The discussion of this subject was expected to con- stitute the substantial work of the Congress, which seemed to have been called together chiefly in order to solve the problem of the greatest pedagogic importance: how to give a moral education. It was that very morning, just as the session was opening, that the frightful news burst upon us like a thunderbolt, that the Empress, Elizabeth of Austria, had been assassinated, and that once again an Italian had struck the blow! The third regicide in Europe within a brief time, that was due to an Italian hand!
The entire public press was unanimously stirred to indigna- tion against the educators of the people; and as a demonstration of hostility, they all absented themselves that day from partici- pating in the Congress.
There was something approaching a tumult in the ranks of teachers; inasmuch as they felt themselves innocent, they pro- tested against the calumny of the newspapers in thus unjustly holding them responsible.
Amid the intense silence of the assembly, Bencivenni delivered a splendid discourse regarding the reform of educative niethods in the school. Next in order, I took the platform and, speaking as a physician, I said: It will be all in vain for you to reform the methods of moral education in our schools, if you do not bear in mind that certain individuals exist, who are the very ones capable of committing such unspeakable deeds, and who pass through school without ever once being influenced in any manner by educa- tion. There exist various categories of abnormal children, who will fruitlessly go through the same grade over and over again, disturbing the routine and discipline of the class: and in spite of punishments and reprimands, they will end by being expelled without having learned anything at all, without having been modi- fied in any manner. What becomes of these individuals who, even in childhood, reveal themselves as the future rebels and ene- mies of society? Yet we leave such a dangerous class in the most complete abandonment. Now, it is useless to reform the school and its methods, if the reformed school and the reformed methods are still going to fail to reach the very children who, for the pro- tection of society, are most in need of being reached ! Any method whatever suffices to fit a sane and normal child for a useful and moral life. The reform that is demanded in school and in pedagogy is one that will lead to the protection of all children
INTRODUCTION 17
during their years of development, including those who have shown themselves refractory to the environment of social life.
Thus I laid the first stone toward the education of mentally deficient children and the foundation of special schools for them. The work which followed forms, I think, the first historic page of a great regeneration in the whole class of teachers and of a profound reform in the school; a question so momentous that it spread rap- idly throughout all Italy and was followed by the establishment of institutes and classes designed expressly for the deficient; and, most important of all, by the universal conviction which it carried, it also constituted the first page of pedagogy reformed upon an anthropological basis.
This is precisely the new development of pedagogy that goes under the name of scientific: in order to educate, it is essential to know those who are to be educated. '^ Taking measurements of the head, the stature, etc." (in other words, applying the anthro- pological method), ''is, to be sure, not in itself the practice of pedagogy," says Sergi, in speaking of what the biological sciences have contributed to this branch of learning during the nineteenth century, ''But it does mean that we are following the path that leads to pedagogy, because we cannot educate anyone until we know him thoroughly."
Here again, in the field of pedagogy, the naturalistic method must lead us to the study of the separate subjects, to a description of them as individuals, and their classification on a basis of char- acteristics in common; and since the child must be studied not by himself alone, but also in relation to the factors of his origin and his individual evolution — since every one of us represents the effect of multifold causes — it follows that the etiological side of the pedagogical branch of modern anthropology, like all its other branches, necessarily invades the field of biology and at the same time of sociology.
Among the types which it will be of pedagogic interest to trace in school-children, we must undoubtedly find those that corre- spond to the childhood of those abnormal individuals already stud- ied in Lombroso's Criminal Anthropology, and in De Giovanni's Clinical Morphology.
Nevertheless, it is a new study, because the characteristics of the child are not those of the adult reduced to a diminutive scale, but they constitute childhood characteristics. Man changes as he
18 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
grows; the body itself not only undergoes an increase in volume, but a profound evolution in the harmony of its parts and the com- position of its tissues; in the same way, the psychic personality of the man does not grow, but evolves; like the predisposition to disease which varies at different ages in each individual considered pathologically. For all those anomalous types which to-day are included under the popular term of deficients, for the pathological weaklings who reveal symptoms of scrofula or rickets, there is no doubt that special schools and methods of education are essential. We teachers would like, through educative means, to counteract the ultimate consequences of degeneration and predisposition to disease: if criminal anthropology has been able to revolutionise the penalty in modern civilisation, it is our duty to undertake, in the school of the future, to revolutionise the individual. And by achiev- ing this ideal, pedagogic anthropology will to a large extent have taken the place of criminal anthropology, just as schools for the abnormal and feeble, multiplied and perfected under the protection of an advanced civilisation, will in a large measure have replaced the prisons and the hospitals.
We owe to the intuitive genius of Giuseppe Sergi the conception of a form of pedagogic anthropology far more exact in its methods of investigation than anything which had hitherto been fore- shadowed. This master takes the ground that a study of abnormal and weakly children is a task of absolutely secondary importance. What is imperative for us to know, he claims, is normal humanity, if we are to guide it intelligently toward that biological and moral perfection, on which the progress of humanity must depend. If general pedagogy is destined to be transformed under a naturalistic impulse, this will be effected only when anthropology turns its investigations to the normal human being.
Educators are still very far from having a real knowledge of that collective body of school-children, on whom a uniformity of method, of encouragement and punishment is blindly inflicted; if, instead of this, the child could be brought before the teacher's eyes as a living individuality, he would be forced to adopt very different standards of judgment, and would be shaken to the very depths of his conscience by the revelation of a responsibility hitherto unsuspected.
Let us take one or two examples; let us consider, among the pupils, one child who is very poor.
INTRODUCTION 19
Studied by the anthropological method, he is revealed, in every personal physiological detail, as an inferior type. The child of poverty, as Niceforo has well shown, is an inferior in stature, in cranium, in weight, in muscular and intellectual strength; and the malformations, resulting from defects of growth, condemn him to an aesthetic inferiority; in other words, environment, mode of living, and nutrition may result in modifying even the relative beauty of the individual. The normal man may bear within him a germ of physical beauty inherited from parents who begot him normally, and yet this germ may not be able to develop, because impeded by environment. Accordingly, physical beauty consti- tutes in itself a class privilege. This child, weak in mind and in muscular force, when compared with the child of wealth, grown up in a favorable environment, shows less attractive manners, because he has been reared in an atmosphere of social inferiority, and in school is classed as a pariah. Less good looking and less refined, he fails to enlist the sympathy which the teacher so readily con- cedes to the courteous manners of more fortunate children; less intelligent himself, and unable to look for help from parents who, more than likely, are illiterate, he fails to obtain the encouragement of praise and high credit marks that are lavished upon stronger children, who have no need of being encouraged. Thus it happens that the down-trodden of society are also the down-trodden in the school. And we call this justice; and we say that demerit is pun- ished and merit is rewarded; but in this way we make ourselves the sycophants of nature and of social error, and not the adminis- trators of justice in education!
On the other hand, let us examine another child, living in an agreeable environment, in the higher social circles ; he possesses all the physical attraction and grace that render childhood charming. He is intelligent, smiling, gentle-mannered; at the cost of small effort he gives his teacher ample satisfaction by his progress, and even if the teacher's method of instruction happens to be somewhat faulty, the child's family hasten privately to make up for the defi- ciency. This child is destined to reap a harvest of praise and re- wards; the teacher, egotistically complacent over the abundant fruit gathered with so little effort, and the moral and aesthetic satisfaction derived from the fortunate pupil, gives him unmeasured affection and smooths his whole course through school. But if we study the rich, intelligent, prize- winning child carefully, we
20 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
find that he, too, is not perfect in his anthropological development; he is too narrow-chested. This is the penalty of the rich and the studious; every privilege brings its own peril; every benefit contains a snare; every one of us to-day, without the light of science, runs the risk of diminishing our physiological equilibrium, by living in an environment that contains so many defects. The child of luxury, living continually indoors, diligently studying in his well- warmed home, under his mother's vigilant eye, is impeding the development of his own chest; and when he has completed his growth and his education, will find himself with insufficient lungs; his physical personality will have been permanently thrown out of equilibrium by a defective environment. This highly cultured man may some day find himself urged on to big endeavour; his intelligence will create vast ideals, but he will not have at his disposal the physical force that is so strictly associated with the power to draw from the surrounding air a sufficient quantity of oxygen by means of respiration. The spirit is ready, but the fiesh is weary; and all his ambitious hopes may be shattered in the very flower of life by pulmonary tuberculosis, to which he has himself created an artificial predisposition.
It is our duty to understand the individual, in order to avoid these fatal errors; and to arise to higher standards of justice, founded upon the real exigencies of life — guided by that spirit of love which is essential to the teacher, in order to render him truly an educator of humanity.
Love is the essential spirit of fecundity whose one purpose is to beget life. And in the teacher, love of humanity must find expression through his work, because the very purpose of love is to create something. Accordingly, this spirit of fecundity ought to produce the teacher's mission, which to-day is the mission of reforming the school and accepting the proud duty of universal motherhood, destined to protect all mankind, the normal and abnormal alike. This is a reform, not only of the school, but of society as a whole, because through the redeeming and protective labours of pedagogy, the lowest human manifestations of degenera- tion and disease will disappear; and, more important still, it will make it henceforth impossible for normal human beings, conceived from germs that promise strength and beauty, little by little to lose that beauty and strength along the rough paths of life, through which no one has hitherto had the knowledge to guide them.
INTRODUCTION 21
*'In the social life of to-day an urgent need has arisen," says our common master, Giuseppi Sergi, "a renovation of our methods of education and instruction; and whoever enrolls himself under this standard, is fighting for the regeneration of man."
Enrico Morselli and Scientific Philosophy. — Among the names of Italian scientists that must be called to mind, in discussing the modern developments of anthropology, a special lustre attaches to that of Enrico Morselli, who has earned the right to call himself the critic, or rather, the philosopher of anthropology. Notwith- standing that he has made his name famous in the vast field of psychiatry, this distinguished Genoese practitioner has found time to assimilate the most diverse branches of science and the most widely separated avenues of thought, qualifying himself as a critic, and systematising experimental science on the lines of scientific philosophy.
His great work. General Anthropology, is developed on synthetic lines, embracing in a single scientific system all the acquired knowledge of the past two centuries, and may rightfully be called the first treatise on philosophic anthropology. While the experi- mental sciences, by collecting and recording separate phenomena, were gradually preparing, throughout the nineteenth century, a great mass of analytical material, chosen blindly and without form, they apparently engendered a new trend of thought posi- tively hostile to philosophy: the odium antiphilosophicum, as Morselli calls it. And conversely, the speculative positivism of Ardigo remained throughout its development a stranger to the immediate sources of experimental research, and adhered strictly to the field of pure philosophy. It remained for Morselli to per- ceive that the scientific material prepared by experimental science was in reality philosophical material, for which it was only neces- sary to prepare instruments and means in order to systematise it and lead it into the proper channels for the construction of a scientific philosophy.
Throughout the whole period of his intellectual activity, Morselli sought to unite experimental science and philosophy, by taking his content from the former and his form from the latter. To gather and catalogue bare facts could not be the scope of science; such labour could result only in sterilising the mind. ''The human mind," says Morselli, ''does not stop at the objective study of a phenomenon and its laws; it wants also to fathom their
22 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
nature; the how does not content it, but it must also have the wherefore." It must mount from facts to synthesis, constantly- achieving a new and fuller understanding. But what determines the content of philosophy is not speculative thought, but facts that have been collected objectively. Such is the view of Enrico Morselli, expressed in the introduction to his Review of Scientific Philosophy: "We think the moment has come for professional philosophers to allow themselves to be convinced that the progress of physical and biological sciences has profoundly changed the tendencies of philosophy; so that it is no longer an assemblage of speculative systems, but rather the synthesis of partial scientific doctrines, the expression of the highest general truths, derived solely and immediately from the study of facts. On the other hand, we hope also that in every student of the separate sciences, whether pure or applied, the intimate conviction will take root that no science which applies the method of observation and experiment to the particular class of phenomena which form its subject, can call itself fully developed so long as it is limited to the collection and classification of facts. Scientific dilettantism of this sort must end by sterilising the human mind, whose natural tendency is to advance from observed phenomena by successive stages to the investigation of their partial laws, and from these to the research of more and more general truths. But philosophy, thus understood, can never confine itself within the dogmatism of a system, but rather will leave the individual mind free to make constant new concessions, in the pursuit of the truth.
''The human mind is condemned to search forever, and perhaps never to find, the ultimate solution to the eternal problem which it offers to itself; accordingly, let it keep itself at liberty to accept to-day as probable, a solution which further researches or newly discovered facts will compel it to reject to-morrow in favor of another. We must admit that in philosophic concepts there is a constant evolution, or rather natural selection, thanks to which the strongest concepts, those best constituted, those that are fitted to make use of scientific discoveries with the broadest liberality, are predisposed to prove victorious or at least to hold their own for a long time in the struggle."*
It is this liberty that makes it possible for us to pursue experi-
* From a study by Prof. E. Troilo, Enrico Morselli as a Philosopher. In the volume by MoESELLi, Milan: Vallabdi, 1906.
INTRODUCTION 23
mental investigations, without fear that our brains may become sterile. And by liberty we mean the readiDess to accept new concepts whenever experience proves to us that they are better and closer to the truth which we are seeking. Even though the absolute truth were never reached, the experimental method is the path most likely to lead us toward it step by step.
'~ Accordingly, what we should demand of investigators is not a creed, a philosophic system, but "the objective method in their researches and in the sources of their inductions." For this is the way to train the workers and philosophers of experimental science. And the same lines must serve us for building up a philoso- phy capable of shaping a regenerated method of pedagogy.
The Method
The determining factor in anthropology is the same that determines all experimental science: the method. A well-defined method in natural science applied to the study of living man offers us the scientific content, which we are in the course of seeking.
The content bursts upon us as a surprise, as the result of applying the method, by means of which we make advances in the investigation of truth.
Whenever a science prescribes for itself, not a content but a method of experimenting, it is for that reason called an experi- mental science.
It is not easy for those who come fresh from the pursuit of philosophic studies to adapt themselves to this order of ideas. The philosopher, the historian, the man of letters prepare them- selves by assimilating the content of one particular branch of learning; and thereby they define the boundaries of their indi- vidual knowledge and close the circle of their individual thought, however vast that circle may be.
Indeed, the elaboration of human thought, the series of historic deeds, the accumulated mass of literature, may offer immense fields ; but after the student has little by little assimilated them, he cannot do otherwise than contain them within him precisely as they are. Their extent is limited by the centuries that cover the history of civilised man, and it is invariable, since it exists as a work accomplished by man.
24 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Experimental science is of an entirely different sort. We must look upon it as a means of investigation into the field of the infinite and the unknown. If wo wish to compare it to some branch of learning that is universally familiar, we may say that an experi- mental science is similar to learning to read. When as children we learn to read, we may, to be sure, estimate the effort that it costs us to master a mechanical device; but such a mechanical device is a means, it is a magic key that will unlock the secrets of wisdom, multiply our power to share the thoughts of our con- temporaries, and render us dexterous in despatching the practical affairs of life.
Thus considered, reading is a branch of learning that has no prescribed limits.
It is our duty to learn to read the truth, in the book of nature;
I. by collecting separate facts, according to the objective method;
II. by proceeding methodically from analysis to synthesis. The subject of our research is the individual human being. _'
1. The Objective Collecting of Single Facts. — In the gathering of data, our science makes use of two means of investigation, as we have already seen : observation or anthroposcopy; and measurement or anthropometry. In order to take measurements, we must know the special anthropometric, instruments and how to use them; and in making observations, we must treat ourselves as instruments, that is, we must divest ourselves of our own personality, of every preconception, in order to become capable of recording the real facts objectively. For since our purpose is to gather our facts from nature and await her revelations, if we allowed ourselves to have scientific preconceptions, we might distort the truth. Here is the point which distinguishes experimental science from a specula- tive science; in the former, we must banish thought, in the latter we must build by means of thought. ' Accordingly at the moment when we are collecting our data, we must possess no other capacity than that of knowing how to collect them with extreme exactness and objectivity.
Accordingly we need a method and a mental preparation, that is, a training which will accustom us to divest ourselves of our own personalities, in order to become simple instruments of investi- gation. For instance, if it were a question of measuring the heads of illiterate children and of other children of the same age, who are attending school, in order to learn whether the heads of
INTRODUCTION 25
educated children show greater development, we need not only to know how to use the millimetric scale and the cranial calipers which are the instruments adapted to this purpose; we need not only to know the anatomical 'points at which the instruments must be applied in the manner established by the accepted method; but we need in addition to be unaware, while taking the measurements, whether the child before us at a given moment is educated or illit- erate because the preconception might work upon us by sugges- tion and thus alter the result. Or again, to take what in a certain sense is an opposite case, and nevertheless analogous, we may undertake a research into some absolutely unknown question, as for instance, what are the psychic characteristics of children whose development has kept fairly close to the normal average, and of those whose anthropological measurements diverge notably from the average: in such a case we ought to measure all the children, make the required psychological tests separately, and then compare the results of the two investigations.
A woman student in my course, last year, undertook precisely this sort of investigation, namely, to find out what was the standing in school of children who represent the normal average anthropo- logical type, that is to say, those whose physical development had been all that was to be desired : and she found that normal children are vivacious (happy), very intelligent, but negligent; and conse- quently their number never includes the heads of the classes, the winners of prizes.
In addition to gathering anthropological data, which requires a special technique of research, we need to know how to proceed to interpret them.
We are no longer at the outset of our observations. No sooner was the method established, than there were a multitude of students in all parts of the world capable of objective research, that is to say, of anthropological investigations. The sum total of all these researches forms a scientific patrimony, which needs to be known to us, in order that our own conclusions may serve to complete those of other investigators, who have preceded us, and thus form a contribution to science.
In other words, there have already been certain principles es- tablished and certain laws discovered, on an experimental basis; and all this forms a true and fitting content of our science. It will serve to guide us in our researches, and to furnish us with a stand-
26 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
ard of comparison for our own conclusions. Thus, for example, when we have measured the stature of a boy of ten, we have un- doubtedly gathered an individual anthropological fact; but in order to interpret it, we must know what is the average stature of boys of ten; and the average will be found established by previous investigators, who have obtained it from actuality, by applying the well-known method of measuring the stature, to a great number of individuals of a specified race, sex, and age, and by obtaining an average on the basis of such research.
Accordingly, we ought to profit from the researches of others, whenever they have been received, as noteworthy, into the litera- ture of science. Nevertheless, the patrimony which science places at our disposition must never be considered as anything more than a guide, an expression of universal collaboration, in accordance with a uniform method. We must never jurare in verba magistri, never accept any master as infallible : we are always at liberty to repeat any research already made, in order to verify it; and this form of investigation is part of the established method of experimental science. One fundamental principle must be clearly understood; that we can never become anthropologists merely by reading all the existing literature of anthropology, including the voluminous works on kindred studies and the in- numerable periodicals; we shall become anthropologists only at the moment when, having mastered the method, we become investigators of living human individuals.)
We must, in short, be producers, or nothing at all; assimilation is useless. For example, let us suppose that a certain teacher has studied anthropology in books: if, after that, he is incapable of making practical observations upon his own pupils, to what end does his theoretical knowledge serve him? ' It is evident that theoretic study can have no other purpose than to guide us in the interpretation of data gathered directly from nature^
Our only book should be the living individual; all the rest taken together form only the necessary means for reading it^
2. The Passage from Analysis to Synthesis. — Assuming that we have learned how to gather anthropological data with a rigorously exact technique, and that we possess a theoretic knowledge and tables of comparative data: all this together does not suffice to qualify us as interpreters of nature. The marvellous reading of this amazing book demands on our part still other forms of prepara-
INTRODUCTION 27
tion. In gathering the separate data, it may be said that we have learned how to spell, but not yet how to read and interpret the sense. The reading must be accomplished with broad, sweeping glances, and must enable us to penetrate in thought into the very synthesis of life. And it is the simple truth that life manifests itself through the living individual, and in no other way. But through these means it reveals certain general properties, certain laws that will guide us in grouping the living individuals according to their common properties; it is necessary to know them, in order to interpret individual differences dependent upon race, age, and sex, and upon variations due to the effort of adaptation to environ- ment, or to pathological or degenerative causes. That is to say, certain general principles exist, which serve to make us interpreters of the meaning, when we read in the book of life.
This is the loftiest part of our work, carrying us above and be- yond the individual, and bringing us in contact with the very fountain-heads of life, almost as though it were granted us to materialise the unknowable. In this way we may rise from the arid and fatiguing gathering of analytical data, toward conceptions of noble grandeur, toward a positive philosophy of life; and un- veil certain secrets of existence, that will teach us the moral norms of hfe.
Because, unquestionably, we are immoral, when we disobey the laws of life ; for the triumphant rule of life throughout the universe is what constitutes our conception of beauty and goodness and truth — in short, of divinity.
The technical method of proceeding toward synthesis, we may find well defined in biology : the data gathered by measurement can be grouped according to the statistical method, be represented graphically and calculated by the application of mathematics to biology: to-day, indeed, biometry and hiostatistics tend to assume so vast a development as to give promise of forming independent sciences.
The method in biology, considered as a whole, may be compared to the microscope and telescope, which are instruments, and yet enable us to rise above and beyond our own natural powers and come into contact with the two extremes of infinity; the infinitely little and the infinitely large.
Objections and Defences. — One of the objections made to peda- gogical anthropology is that it has not yet a completely defined con-
28 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
tent, on which to base an organic system of instruction and reliable general rules.
It is the method alone that enables us to be eloquent in defence of pedagogic anthropology, against such an accusation. For the accusation itself is the embodiment of a conception of a method differing widely from our own : it is the accusation made by specula- tive science, which, resting on the basis of a content, refuses to acknowledge a science that is still lacking and incomplete in its content, because it is unable to conceive that a science may be essentially summed up in its method, which makes it a means of revelation.
How could we conceive of the content of pedagogic anthropology otherwise than as something to be derived by the experimental method from the observation of school-children? And where could we conceive of a possible laboratory for such a science, if not in the school itself? The content will be determined little by little, by the application of the anthropological study to school-children in the school, and never in any other manner.
Now, if it were necessary to await the completion of a content before proceeding to any practical application, where could we hope to get this content from — especially since we look for no help either from speculative philosophy or divine revelation?
When a method is applied to any positive science, it results in giving that science a new direction, that is to say, a new avenue of progress: And it is precisely in the course of advance along that avenue that the content of the science is formed: but if we never made the advance, the science would never take its start. Thus, for example, when the microscope revealed to medicine the existence of micro-organisms, and bacteriology arose as the positive study of epidemiology, it altered the whole procedure in the cure and pro- phylaxis of infective maladies. Prior to this epoch people believed that an epidemic was a scourge sent by divine wrath upon sinners; or else they imagined it was a miasma transported by the wind, which groves and eucalyptus trees might check; or they pictured the ground ejecting miasmatic poisons through its pores: — and human- ity sought in vain to protect itself with bare-foot processions and religious ceremonies, attended by jostling throngs and cruel flagel- lation; or else they betook themselves to the shade of eucalyptus trees, in the midst of malarial lowlands. Entire cities were de- stroyed by pestilence, and malarial districts remained uncultured
INTRODUCTION 29
deserts, because entire populations, in the brave effort to perform their work, were destroyed by successive impoverishment of the blood.
It is bacteriology that has put to flight this darkness of ignorance that was the herald of death, and has created the modern condi- tions of environment, which, by a multitude of means, defend the individual and the nation from infective diseases; so that to- day civilised society may be said to be advancing toward a triumph over death.
But the microbes have not all of them been discovered ; bacteri- ology and general pathology are still very far from having com- pleted their content. If we had been obliged to wait for such com- pletion, we should still be living quite literally in the midst of mediaeval epidemics; or, to state the case better, where in the world would the science of medicine ever have attained its new content? For it has been building it up, little by little, hy directing medicine upon a new path. It was the introduction of this new method of investigating the patient and his environment that experimentally reaped the fruit of new etiological discoveries, and new means of defence : the microscope became perfected because it came into universal use in practice; bacterial cultures owe their perfectionment to the fact that they became the common means of investigation for the purpose of diagnosis; just as tests in clinical chemistry have become perfected through practical use. Without which, who would ever have perfected the microscope, or the science of bacteriology? In a word, whence are we to get the content of any positive science, if not from practical application?
A direction and an applied method represent a triumph of progress ; and in progress, a content cannot have defined limits. We do not know its goal; we know only that at the moment when it finds its goal, it will cease to be progress.
It is many years since medicine abandoned the speculative course, and we see it to-day hourly enriching itself with new truths; its triumphal march is never checked, and it moves onward toward the invasion of future centuries. In the wake of its progress, that frightful phenomenon which we call mortality tends to fall steadily to a lower level; giving rise to the hope that through future progress it will cease to be the mysterious, menacing fate, ever watchful and ready to sever the invisible threads of human life. These threads are to-day revealing themselves as
3
30 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
the resistant fibres of a fabric; because, humanity by engaging collectively in the audacious search after truth, and by thus pro- tecting the interests of each individual through the common in- terests, has succeeded in offering a powerful resistance to the mysterious sheers.
Accordingly, we may say that the substitution to-day of an anthropological development of pedagogy, in the place of a purely philosophical and speculative trend, does not offer it merely an additional content, an auxiliary to all the other forms of teaching on which it now comfortably reposes; but it opens up new avenues, fruitful in truth and in life; and as it advances along these avenues, regenerated from its very foundations upward, it may be that pedagogy is destined to solve the great problem of human redemption.
The Method to be Followed in These Lectures
Lastly, just one more word regarding the didactic method that I intend to follow, in delivering this course of lectures. From the purpose already stated, it follows that this Course in Anthropology must be eminently practical. Of the three weekly lectures, only one will be theoretical; that is to say, only one in which I shall expound the content of our science; a second lecture will treat of the technique of the method; that is to say, I shall devote it to describing the practical way of gathering anthropological data, and how we must study them and re-group them in order to extract their laws; and finally, the third lecture will be practical and clinical; I shall devote it to the collection of anthropological data from human subjects, and little by little I shall try to work toward the individual study of pupils, until we reach the compila- tion of biographic charts. At the lectures of the third type, we shall have present subjects who will be, for the most part, normal, but some of them will be abnormal, and all will be drawn from the elementary schools of Rome.
Finally, in further illustration of our course, we shall make excursions, visiting certain schools that offer some particular in- terest from our scientific point of view; to the end that we may supply what is lacking and what is needed to complete a University Course in Scientific Pedagogy, namely a ''Pedagogical Clinic," where pupils of the widest variety of types might be educated,
INTRODUCTION 31
and where it might be possible to lay practical foundations of a faiw-eaching reform in our schools,
' Accordingly, I shall repeat myself three times, in these lectures; first, by setting forth the scientific content, secondly, by expound- * ing the methods of investigation, and thirdly, by applying in prac- tice what I have already taught in theory. The didactic method of repeating the same instruction under different forms, is also a feature of scientific pedagogy, because it represents the method by which positive science must be taught and acquired; and furthermore, it is the method that deserves to be applied wherever induction of any sort is to be given.
Hitherto, we have not learned how to study; we know only, or at least the majority of us do, how to absorb the contents of books. The only true student is the scientist, who knows how to advance slowly; we educators on the contrary plunge in a dizzy, headlong rush, through all acquirable knowledge. To study is to look steadily, to stand still, to assimilate and to wait. We should study for the sake of creating, since the whole object of taking is to be able to give again; but in this giving and taking we ought not to be mere instruments, like high-pressure suction pumps; in work of this sort we ought to be creators, and when we give back, to add that part which has been horn and developed within us from what we acquired. It is wise to give our acquired knowledge time not only to be assimilated but also to develop freely in that fertile psychic ground that constitutes our innermost personality. In other words: assimilate by every possible means, and then waitj
In order to start from a point of established knowledge, let us consider what is meant by meditation: to meditate means to isolate one's thoughts within the limits of some definite subject, and wait to see what that subject of its own accord may reveal to us, in the course of assimilation. The Jesuits succeeded in winning souls merely by encouraging the people to meditate; meditation opened up an unsuspected inner world, which fascinated the type of person accustomed to flit lightly in thought across a multitude of diverse matters; and under the spell of such fascination, their consciences could attribute to nothing less than some occult power, what was really the application of a great pedagogic principle.
' There is a great difference between reading and meditating: we may read a voluminous novel in a single night; we may meditate upon a verse of Scripture for an entire hour. | Anyone who reads
32 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
a novel in a night undoubtedly squanders his physical powers, like a wind that passes over arid ground; but one who meditates assimi- lates in a special manner that surprises the meditator himself, because he feels something unforeseen coming to life within him, just as though a seed had been planted in fertile soil and, while remaining motionless, had begun to germinate. Accordingly, the act of holding acquired knowledge within ourselves for a period of time results in self-development; superficial learning, on the con- trary, means the exhaustion of our personal resources. We become steadily more exhausted and more inefficient, through too much study; and instead, we ought to become all the time more flourish- ing and more robust, if we studied in the proper way: and this is because we squander our psychic powers, instead of acquiring new energy. The consequence of this mistaken method is that we rapidly forget all that we have learned. Everything is acquired at the cost of effort; what we need is to labor patiently, in order to acquire in the real sense. To-day it is the fashion to study in order to enter upon that particular business or profession that is destined to be our life's work; what we ought to do instead, is to devote our energies to the conquest of thought and the elevation of the spirit.
The didactic method that I am trying to illustrate is not a new one; it dates back to the first precursors of scientific pedagogy. Half a century ago, a marvellous work on pedagogy, based on similar principles, was issued from the press; it was the method elaborated by Seguin, based on thirty years of practical experi- ence in the education of idiotic children. Such a system cannot be foreign to the interests of schools intended for average, normal children, because it is not a specialised method, like that for deaf- mutes or for the blind. Being designed for the mentally deficient, this method applies to any class of undeveloped beings who are striving to grow bigger; we may even apply it to ourselves, and thereby increase our own mental stature. In short, pedagogically considered, it is a rational method.
Perhaps it is already familiar to a good many of you; but an example or two will serve to illustrate it. Let us suppose that we have to impart a lesson in history to a deficient pupil : first of all, a picture is shown him, representing an historic fact; then the same fact v/ill be shown him in as many different ways as possible — through the cinematograph, for example. Finally it will be acted
INTRODUCTION 33
on the stage; and in this case, it is the children themselves who prepare the setting and endeavor, to the best of their ability, to impersonate the historic figures. Now, it is precisely at ijie moment when they are reproducing the scene that these children feel it, and it is only then that they learn. But this is ^ot peculiar to deficient children: the same path is the common path for all; it is necessary for all of us to assimilate mentally and to feel, before we can say: I have learned. If there is a latent tendency in the mind of a normal child to love historic happenings, then he will love them, and thus reveal to his teacher_^ne of his intimate and secret tendencies; in other words, we shall have developed a taste, of which the hidden germs already existed. Perhaps it was in some such way that Sabatier succeeded in realising the environment and the life of St. Francis of Assisi.
Let us suppose, again, that we have to teach a child what is meant, in geography, by a mountain, a lake, or an island. Accord- ing to Seguin's method, we should take the child out into the garden, and make him construct a miniature mountain with earth, a lake with water, etc., than make him trace their geograph- ical outline with chalk, then make him paint them in oils or water- colours, so that in the end he will have, as the result of his handi- work, a little monument, so to speak, of the acquired lesson. It is only after a child has worked that he begins to learn and to be in- terested. Does not everyone know that, as between the one who receives, and the one who confers a favor, it is the latter who cares the more, because he has done something? The next step is to take the pupil to the top of some hill, so that he may see with his own eyes the things that we have taught him in the garden and through the medium of work; and in the silent contemplation of nature, it may happen that a normal child will hear the call of her mysterious voice, and reveal a dormant tendency to become some day, perhaps, a geographer, or an explorer, like the Duke of the Abruzzi; or perhaps he will feel that lure of nature which, some day or other, when he reaches maturity, will lead him to investigate the secrets of the earth and of meteorological phenom- ena, even to the point of such heroic sacrifice as was exemplified by Professor Matteucci, during the eruption of Vesuvius.
Repeating the same things over and over, keeping the mind fixed upon the selfsame lesson, teaching how to reproduce objects by the work of the hands, bringing the pupil into direct contact
34 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
with the object that he is desired to study, such is the true way to enable him to learn. The man who has been educated according to this method has not fruitlessly expended his energy in fatiguing study; he has preserved his forces unimpaired; indeed, if anything, they are all the sounder and more flourishing. By such a system of education, we launch upon the world a sturdy generation, imbued with that living energy, that constitutes the one and only mainspring that really makes the world move.
Accordingly this is the method that we shall follow: studying, repeating, working experimentally: the subject of our study is humanity; our pupose is to become teachers. Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher con- sciousness of a mission.
The Limits of Pedagogical Anthropology
In concluding this preamble, it may be well to define the form of study and the purposes of pedagogical anthropology; in order to distinguish it clearly from general anthropology and from the allied branches of applied anthropology (criminal and medical anthropology) .
Pedagogical anthropology, like all the other branches of anthro- pology, studies man from the naturalistic point of view ; but, unlike general anthropology, it does not concern itself with the philo- sophic problems related to it, such, for instance, as the origin of man, the theories of monism or polygenism, of emigration, and classification according to race; problems which, as everyone knows, are difficult of solution, and which constitute the pivot on which biological anthropology revolves. Thus, for example, bacteri- ology has its origin in biology, in so far as it has certain orders of living organisms for the subject of its research; but it well nigh ignores the problems of biological philosophy associated with them, such as the origin of living matter and of the primitive cell; the fixity or variability of monocellular species; the possibility of life in the isolated nucleus (the microbe), or in the isolated protoplasm (the monera), but it devotes itself to the direct study of microscopic organisms, both in themselves alone and in their influence upon their environment; in short, bacteriology has for its purpose the acquirement of that practical knowledge necessary
INTRODUCTION 35
for a successful campaign against the causes of infective maladies, and for rendering infected districts sanitary. In much the same way, pedagogical anthropology, considered as a form of study, departs from general anthropology. It studies man from two different points of view: his development (ontogenesis), and his variations.
Since many causes concur in producing variations in the indi- vidual during his development (social causes, pathological causes, etc.), we have to take into consideration, and frequently invoke the aid of subsidiary sciences (sociology, pathology, hygiene). Varia- tions constitute the most important subject of inquiry in pedagogic anthropology, just as iixed characteristics constitute the essential matter of research in general anthropology: because the latter endeavours, by the help of fixed characteristics, to trace back to the origin of species, while the former tries, through the help of variable characteristics, to discover a way for the future perfec- tionment of the human species and the individual: indeed, this is precisely what constitutes the practical purpose of its application to pedagogy.
In comparison with criminal and medical anthropology, peda- gogic anthropology differs substantially in its declared intentions. These other two kindred branches endeavour to diagnose the per- sonality of the individual; we must admit that both psychiatry and general medical practice profit by the application of anthro- pology to the extent of securing greater accuracy in diagnosis and prognosis; but whenever the study of a patient's 'personality sheds light upon decisions of this sort, it generally follows that the personality is fixed and unalterable. For instance, when, in medical practice an individual constitution is shown to be fatally pre- disposed to certain definite diseases, that is precisely one of the cases where medical treatment is most impotent; and the same may be said when, in the practice of criminal law we find a defendant whose personality is profoundly degenerate. It follows that the application of these new anthropological methods is substantially diagnostic; furthermore, they are limited to special classes of human beings, to those who are physiologically the most impover- ished, such as criminals and the diseased. Pedagogic anthropology, on the contrary, embraces all humanity; but it pays special atten- tion to that part of it which is psychologically superior : the normal human being. Its purpose is none the less diagnostic; but it
36 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
regards diagnosis as constituting a means, and not merely indicat- ing an end; because the end projected by pedagogic anthropology is a far-reaching and rational system of hygiene.
More than that, the proposed system is the one true one, a hygiene that pays more attention to the man himself than to his environment; striving to perfect him in his physiological functions, or to correct any tendency to abnormal and patho- logical deviations.
It follows that, in pedagogic anthropology, the direction taken by the naturalistic study of man is predominantly physiological.
In the same manner as the other two kindred branches of anthro- pology, this branch which has joined forces with pedagogy has severed connection with the original parent stock of general anthropology, and abandoned its dogmatisms and to a large extent its phraseology.
Criminal anthropology, for example, shows great daring and scant accuracy in its affirmations and its researches; and to a large extent it has acquired a nomenclature of its own; and medical anthropology lays down laws that general anthropology never took into consideration, and neglects to bestow particular attention upon the head, which formed the object of fundamental research in general anthropology.
In the same way, pedagogic anthropology has had to emancipate itself from the general science from which it has sprung, in order to proceed unhampered along the practical line of research, which consists essentially in a study of the pupil and the compilation of biographic charts, from which a fund of material will result, destined to enrich the scientific content of this branch of learning.
But since the study of the pupil must not be morphological alone, but psychological as well, it is necessary for anthropology to invoke the aid of experimental psychology, in order to achieve its purpose. Now it is essential to psychology, no less than to pedagogic anthropology, to study the reactions of the physiological and psychical personality of the child in the environment which we call school. Consequently it is reserved for the teacher to make a large contribution to these two parallel sciences, which are coming to assume the highest social importance.
It follows further that pedagogic anthropology differs from the other two allied branches in its practical applications; the progress of criminal and medical anthropology requires, as a matter of fact,
INTRODUCTION 37
only the labors of medical specialists; in the case of pedagogic anthropology there is equally a need of medical specialists, to whom the diagnosis and the treatment of abnormal pupils must be entrusted, as well as the hygiene of their development ; but in addi- tion to these, the teachers also are summoned to a vast task of observation, which, by its continuity, will supplement and com- plete the periodic observations of the physician.
Furthermore, the teacher will acquire under the guidance of anthropology certain practical rules in the art of educating the child; and it is this especially that makes the anthropological and psychological training of the modern teacher so necessary.
The school constitutes an immense field for research; it is a ''pedagogical clinic," which, in view of its importance, can be compared to no other gathering of subjects for study. Thanks to the system of compulsory education, it gathers to itself every living human being of both sexes and of every social caste, normal and abnormal; and it retains them there, throughout a most important period of their growth. This is the field, therefore, in which the culture of the human race can really and practically be undertaken; and the joint labour of physician and teacher will sow the seed of a future human hygiene, adapted to achieve perfection in man, both as a species and as a social unit.
CHAPTER I
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY
In order to understand the practical researches that must be conducted for anthropological purposes, it is necessary to have an adequate preparation in the science of biology. The inter- pretation of the data that have to be gathered according to tech- nical procedure, demands a training; and this training will form our subject in the theoretic part of the present volume. The limits, however, not only of the book itself, but' of pedagogic anthropology as well, preclude anything more than a simple general outline; but this can be supplemented by those other branches of study which are either collateral to it or constitute its necessary basis (i.e., general biology, human anatomy and physiology, hygiene of environment, general anthropology, etc.).
The Mateeial Substeatum of Life The Synthetic Concept of the Individual in Biology
According to the materialistic theories of life, of which Haeckel is the most noted supporter, life was derived from a form of matter, protoplasm, which not only has a special chemical composition, but possesses further the property of a constant molecular move- ment of scission and redintegration; vital metabolism or inter- change of matter, by which the molecules are constantly renewed at the expense of the environment.
It was Huxley who defined protoplasm as the physical basis of life; and, as a matter of fact, life does not exist without protoplasm. But Schultze and Haeckel carried this doctrine further, to the point of maintaining that a minute particle of protoplasm was all that was needed to constitute life; and that such a particle could be formed naturally, whenever the surrounding conditions were favorable, like any other inorganic chemical substance; and in this way the materialists endeavoured, with great ingenuousness, to maintain the spontaneous origin of life. And when Haeckel
38
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 39
thought that he had discovered the monerce or living cells composed of a single particle of protoplasm, he held that these were the first species to have appeared on earth.
But the further researches of physiologists and the improve- ments in the technique of the microscope proved that protoplasm does not exist independently in nature; because living cells are always a combination of protoplasm and a nucleus. If the nucleus is extracted from a radiolarium, the latter mortifies, and the proto- plasm also dies; if an amoeba is severed in such a manner that one part contains nucleus and protoplasm and the other protoplasm alone, it will be found that the latter part mortifies and dies, while the first part continues to live. If an infusorium is divided in such a way that each of the separate sections contains a part of the nucleus and a part of the protoplasm, two living infusoria are developed similar to the original one. Experiments of this kind, to which Verworn has given high authority, serve to prove that life does not exist except in cells divisible into protoplasm and nucleus. Further discoveries confirm this theory, as for instance the presence of a nucleus in hemacytes or red blood corpuscles, which were formerly believed to be instances of anuclear cells; and the discovery of protoplasm in microbes, which had formerly been considered free nuclei.
Now, when we have an independent living cell, it represents an individual, which not only has, as a general feature, this primitive complexity of parts, but also certain special characteristics of form, of reaction to environment, etc., that mark the species to which this particular living creature belongs.
Accordingly, we cannot assert, without committing the error of confining ourselves to a generic detail, that life originates in pro- toplasm or in a combination divisible into protoplasm and nucleus; we should say that life originates in living individuals; since, aside from abstract speculation, there can be no other material substra- tum of life.
Such a doctrine is eminently synthetic, and opens the mind to new conceptions regarding the properties that characterise life.
Formerly when life was defined as a form of matter (proto- plasm) subject to constant movement (metabolism), only a single general property had been stated; for that matter, even the stars consist of matter and movement; and, according to the modern theory of electrons, atoms are composed of little particles strongly
40 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
charged with electricity and endowed with perennial motion. Accordingly, these are universal characteristics, and not peculiar to life; and metabolism may be regarded as a variation of such a property, which is provoked by, or at least associated with the phenomenon of life.
The properties which are really characteristic of life have been summed up by Laloy in two essential groups; final causes and limitations of mass, or, to use a term more appropriate to living organisms, limitations of form and size.
The term final causes refers to a series of phenomena that are met with only where there is life, and that tend toward a definite purpose or end. Living organisms take nutriment from their environment, to the end of assimilating it, that is, transforming it from an inert, indifferent substance into a substance that is a living part of themselves.
This phenomenon is undoubtedly one of the most characteristic. But there are still other forms of final cause, such for example as the transformation of the fertilised ovum into the fully developed individual, predetermined in its essential characteristics, such as form, dimensions, colour, activities, etc. There are ova that to all appearances are exactly alike; the human ovum itself is nothing more than a simple cell composed of protoplasm and nucleus, measuring only a tenth of a millimeter ( = -^-q inch) ; yet all these ovum cells produce living organisms of the utmost diversity; yet so definitely predetermined that, if we know to what species the ovum belongs, we are able to predict how many bones will compose the skeleton of the animal destined to develop from it, and whether this animal will fly or creep upon the ground, or rise to take a place among those who have made themselves the lords ,of the earth. Furthermore, knowing the phases of development, we may predetermine at what periods the successive transforma- tions that lead step by step to the complete development of the individual will take place.
Another form of final cause is seen in the actions of living creatures, which reveal a self -consciousness; a consciousness that even in its most obscure forms guides them toward a destined end.
Thus, for example, even the infusoria that may be seen through a microscope in a drop of water, chasing hither and thither in great numbers, avoiding collision with one another, or contending over some particle of food, or rushing in a mass toward an un-
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 41
expected ray of light, give us a keen impression of their possession of consciousness, a dim ghmmering of self-will, which is the most elementary form of that phenomenon that manifests itself more and more clearly, from the metazoa upward, through the whole zoologic scale : the final cause of psychic action.
Again, in multicellular organisms there are certain continuous and so-called vital phenomena, which some physiologists attribute to cellular consciousness: for example, the leucocytes in the blood seem to obey a sort of glimmering consciousness when they rush to the encounter of any danger threatening the organism, and ingest microbes or other substances foreign to the blood; and it is also due to a phenomenon that cannot be explained by the phys- ical laws of osmosis, that the erythrocytes or red blood corpuscles and the plasma in the blood never interchange sodium salts for those of potassium; and lastly the cells of each separate gland seem to select from the blood the special substances that are needed for the formation of their specific products : saliva, milk, the pancreatic juice, etc.
Still another manifestation of iinal cause is the tendency ex- hibited by each living individual to make a constant struggle for life, a struggle that depends upon a minimum expenditure of force for a maximum realisation of life, thanks to which life multiplies, invades its environment, adapts itself to it, and is transformed.
Another fundamental synthetic characteristic of life is the limitation of form and size that is a fixed and constant factor in the characteristics of each species ; the body of the living individual cannot grow indefinitely.
Living creatures do not increase in quantity by the successive accumulation of matter, as is the case with inorganic bodies, but by reproduction, that is, the multiplication of individuals.
Through the phenomenon of reproduction, life has a share in the eternity of matter and of force, that is, in a universal phenom- enon. But what distinguishes it is that the individual creatures produced by other living individuals form, each one of them, an indivisible element in which life manifests itself; and this element is morphologically fixed in the limits of its form and size.
The peculiarities which are attributed to the chemical action of protoplasm are of an analytic character, so far as they concern the fundamental characteristics of life. The constant inter- change of matter, namely, metabolism, constitutes undoubtedly a
42 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
phenomeDon peculiar to living matter, protoplasm; but protoplasm does not exist apart from living organisms. And what constitutes its chief characteristic is that, when brought into contact with it, inert substances are assimilated, i. e., they become like it, or rather, are transformed into protoplasm; mineral salts such as the nitrates or nitrites of sodium and potassium are transformed in the case of plants into living plasma capable of germinating either into a rose bush or a plane tree or a palm, and inert organic substances such as bread or wine are transformed into human flesh and blood. So that the phenomenon of assimilation outweighs, as a character- istic of life, the molecular chemical action through which it is accomplished. Since metabolism does not occur in nature as a chemical phenomenon, and cannot be produced artificially, but is found only in the matter composing living organisms, it follows that life is the cause of this form of dynamic action, and not that this dynamic action is the cause of life.*
Even the latest theory, developed especially by Ludwig in Germany — that protoplasm contains a separate enzyme for each separate function appointed to a particular task — amounts to nothing more than an analysis of the living organism.
The Formation of Multicellular Organisms
We cannot say that the cell is the element of life, because, in an absolute sense, it is not alive; it lives only when it constitutes an individual. Even the brain cells, the muscular fibres, the leuco- cytes, etc., are cells; but they do not live independently; their life depends upon the living individual that contains them. We may, however, define the cell as the means, the morphological material, out of which all living organisms are formed: because, from the algse to the orchids, from the coelenterata up to man, all complex organisms are composed of an accumulation of those microscopic little bodies that we call cells.
The manner of union between the cells in the most primitive living colonies, whether vegetable or animal, is analogous to that followed in the segmentation of the ovum in its ontogenetic {i.e., individual) development.
*See further, as to these fundamental ideas: Laloy, L' Evolution de la Vie. Petite En- cyclopedie dii XX Sihcle; Claude Bernard, Legons sur les Phenomhnes de la Vie; Le Dentu, in La Matihre Vivante, et Theorie nouvelle de la Vie; Luciani, Fisiologia Umana, in the first chapter: "Material Substratum of Vital Phenomena."
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 43
But the manner of construction differs notably, as between animal and vegetable cells.
Vegetable cells, on the one hand, have a resistant and strongly protective membrane; animal cells, on the contrary, have either a very thin membrane or none at all. Vegetable cells, as though made venturesome by their natural protection, proceed to invade their environment in colonies — in other words, the cells dispose themselves in series of linear ramifications — witness the formation of primitive algae; and analogously the expansion of the higher types of vegetation into their environment, with branches, leaves, etc. And just as though the vegetable cell acquired self-confi- dence because it is so well protected, it becomes stationary and strikes its roots into the soil.
To this same fact of cellular protection must be attributed the inferior sensibility and hence the permanent state of obscured consciousness in vegetable life.
This protection against the assaults of environment, and the con- sequent lack of sensibility, constitute from the outset an inferior stage of evolution.
Animal cells have an entirely different manner of forming themselves into colonies; acting as though they were afraid, they group themselves in the form of a little sphere, enclosing their environment within themselves, instead of reaching out to invade it; and subsequent developments of the animal cell consist in suc- cessive and complex invaginations, or formations of layers, one within another — instead of ramifications, after the manner of vegetable cells.
Accordingly, if we advance from that primitive animal type, the volvox, consisting of a simple group of cells arranged spherically, like an elastic rubber ball, to the coelenterata, we meet with the phenomenon of the first invagination, producing an animal body consisting of two layers of cells and an internal cavity, communicating with the exterior by means of a pore or mouth. The two layers of cells promptly divide their task, the outer layer becoming pro- tective and the inner nutritive; and in consequence of their different functions, the cells themselves alter, the outer layer acquiring a tougher consistency, while the inner remains soft in order to absorb whatever nutriment is brought by the water as it passes through the mouth. In this way, there is a division of labor, such that all the external cells protect not only themselves, but the whole
44
PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
organism; while the internal cells absorb nutriment not only for themselves but for the others. This is the simplest example of a process that becomes more and more complex in the formation of higher organisms; in adapting themselves to their work, the cells become greatly modified (formation of tissues) and perform services that are useful to the entire organism. And at the same time, because of the very fact that they have been differentiated, they become dependent upon the labors of others, for obtaining the means of subsistence. Similar laws seem to persist even at the present day in the formation of social organisms, in human society.
During the development of the embryo, all animals pass through similar phases; and to this man is no exception.
He traces his origin to an ovum-cell formed of protoplasm, nucleus and membrane, measur- ing only a tenth of a millimetre, yet vastly large in comparison with the spermatic cell destined to fertilise it by passing through one of the innumerable pores that render the dense membrane penetrable.
After the ovum-cell is fertilised, it consti- tutes the first cell of the new being; that is, it contains potentially a man. But as seen through the microscope, it is really not materially any-
FiG. 1. — Human Ovum, Magnified. a. Vitelline mem- brane; b. Vitellus; c. Germinal Vesicle.
Fig. 2. — First Segmentation of a Fertilised Ovum.
Fig. 3.— a Morula as seen from the Outside.
Fig. 4. — An Egg and Spermatozoon of the same Species, about to Fertilise It. Note the difference in the pro- portional size of the two cells.
thing more than a microscopic cell, undifferentiated, and in all things similar to other independent cells or to fertilised ovarian cells belonging to other animals. That which it contains, namely, man, often already predetermined not only in species, but in
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 45
individual characteristics — as, for instance, in degenerative in- feriority— is certainly not there in material form.
At an early stage of the embryo's development, it exhibits a form analogous to that of the volvox; namely, a hollow sphere, called the morula; and subsequently, by the process of invagi- nation, two layers of cells, an inner and an outer, are formed, together with the first body cavity, destined to become the digestive cavity, and also a pore corresponding to the mouth.
This formation has received the name of gastrula (Fig. 10, facing page 72), and the two layers of cells are known as the primary layers, otherwise called the ectoderm and the entoderm. To these a third intermediate layer is soon added, the mesoderm. These three layers consist of cells that are not perceptibly differentiated from one another; but potentially each and every one contains its own special final cause. In each of the three layers, invaginations take place, furrows destined to develop into the nervous system, the lungs, the liver, the various different glands, the generative organs; and during the progress of such modifications, corresponding changes take place in the elementary cells, which become differ- entiated into tissues. From the ectoderm are developed the nerv- ous system and the skin tissues; from the entoderm, the digestive system with its associate glands (the liver, pancreas, etc.) ; from the mesoderm, the supporting tissues (bones and cartilage) and the muscles. But all these cells, even the most complex and spe- cialised, as for example those of the cerebral cortex, the fibres of the striped muscles, the hepatic cells, etc., were orginally em- bryonic cells — in other words, simple, undifferentiated, all starting on an equal footing. Yet every one of them had within it a predestined end that led it to occupy, as it multiplied in number, a certain appointed portion of the body, in order to perform the work, to which the profound alterations in its cellular tissues should ultimately adapt it.
Like children in the same school, these embryonic cells, all apparently just alike, contain certain dormant activities and des- tinies that are profoundly different. This unquestionably con- stitutes one of the properties of life, namely, the final cause; it is certainly associated intimately with metabolism and nutrition, considered as a means of development and not as a cause. Upon metabolism, however, depends the more or less complete attain- ment of the final cause of life. In man, for example, strength,
46 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
health, beauty, on the one hand, degeneration on the other, stand in intimate relations with the nutrition of the embryo.*
The Theories of Evolution. — At the present day, there is a general popular understanding of the fundamental principles involved in the mechanical or materialistic theories of evolution which bear the names of Lamarck, Geffroy-Saint-Hilaire, and more especially the glorious name of Charles Darwin.
According to these theories, the environment is regarded as the chief cause of the evolution of organic forms. Charles Darwin, who formulated the best and most detailed theory of evolution, based it on the two principles of the variability of living organisms, and heredity, which transmits their characteristics from generation to generation. And in explanation of the underlying cause of evolution, he expounded the doctrines of the struggle for existence and the natural selection of such organic forms as succeeded to a sufficient degree in adapting themselves to their environment.
Whatever the explanation may be, the substantial fact re- mains of the variability of species and the successive and gradual transition from lower to higher forms. In this way, the higher animals and plants must have had as antecedents other forms of inferior species, of which they still bear more or less evident traces; and in applying these theories to the interpretation of the person- alities of human degenerates, he frequently invoked the so-called principle of atavism, in order to explain the reappearance of atavis- tic traits that have been outgrown in the normal human being, certain anomalies of form more or less analogous to parallel forms in lower species of animals.
There are other theories of evolution less familiar than that of Darwin. Naegeli, for instance, attributes the variability of species to internal, rather than external causes — namely, to a spontaneous activity, implanted in life itself, and analogous to that which is witnessed in the development of an individual organ- ism, from the primitive cell up to the final complete development; without, however, attributing to the progressive alterations in species that predestined final goal which heredity determines in the development of individual organisms.
The internal factor, namely life, is the primary cause of progress and the perfectionment of living creatures — while environment
* Consult: H aeckel,, Anthropogenie; E. Perkier, Les Colonies animales et la Formation des Organismes; Richet, L' Effort vers la Vie, et la Theorie des Causes finales.
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 47
assumes a secondary importance, such as that of directing evolu- tion, acting at one time as a stimulus toward certain determined directions of development; at another, permanently establishing certain useful characteristics; and still again, effacing such forms as are unfit.
In this way the external causes are associated with evolution, but with very different effects from those attributed to them by Darwin, who endowed them with the creative power to produce new organs and new forms of life.
Naegeli compared the internal forces to invested capital; it will draw a higher or lower rate of interest, according as its environ- ment proves to be more or less favourable to earning a profit.
The most modern theory of evolution is that of De Vries, who, after having witnessed the spontaneous and unforeseen transfor- mations of a certain plant, the (Enohtera Lamarckiana, without the intervention of any external phenomenon, admitted the pos- sibility of the unexpected occurrence of other new forms, from a preexistent parent form — and to such phenomena he gave the name of mutations.
It is these mutations that create new species; the latter, although apparently unheralded, were already latent in the germ before they definitely burst into life. Consequently, new species are formed potentially in the germinating cells, through spontaneous activity.
The characteristics established by mutations are hereditary, and the species which result from them persist, provided their environment affords favourable conditions, better suited to them than to the preexisting parent form.
Accordingly new species are created unexpectedly. De Vries draws a distinction between mutations and variations, holding that the latter are dependent upon environment, and that in any case they constitute simple oscillations of form around the normal type determined in each species by mutation.
Species, therefore, cannot be transformed by external causes or environments, and the mechanism of transformation is not that of a succession of very gradual variations, which have given rise to the familiar saying: natura non facit saltus. On the contrary, what produces stable characteristics is a revolution prepared in a latent state, but unannounced in its final disclosure. A parallel to this is to be found, for example, in the phenomena of puberty in its relation to the evolution of the individual.
48 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Now, when a species has once reached a fixed stability as regards its characteristics, it is immutable, after the analogy of an individual organism that has completed its development; hence- forth its further evolution is .ended. In such a case, the oscilla- tions of variability are exceedingly limited, and adaptation to new environments is difficult; and while a species may offer the appearance of great strength (e.g., certain species of gigantic extinct animals), it runs the risk of dying out, because of a lower potentiality of adaptability; or, according to the theory of Rosa, it m.ay even become extinct spontaneously.
Accordingly it is not the fixed species that continue the process of evolution. If we compare the tree of life to a plant, we may imagine evolution as soaring upward, sustained by roots far below; the new branches are not put forth by the old branches, but draw their sustenance from the original sources, from which the whole tree draws its life. When a branch matures and flowers, it may survive or it may wither but it cannot extend the growth of the tree.
Furthermore, the new branches are always higher up than the old ones; that which comes last is the highest of all.
Thus, the species which are the latest in acquiring a stable form are the highest up in the biological scale, because the privilege of carrying forward the process of evolution belongs to those species which have not yet become fixed. An apparent weakness, instability, an active capacity for adaptation, are consequently so many signs of superiority, as regards a potential power of evolu- tion— just as the nudity and sensibility of animal cells, for example, are signs of superiority, as compared with vegetable cells — and of man, as compared with the lower animals.
In order to show that the inferiority of a species is in propor- tion to its precocity in attaining fixed characteristics, Rosa con- ceived the following striking comparison. Two animals are fleeing, along the same road, before an advancing flood. One of the two climbs to the top of a neighboring tree, the other continues in its flight toward a mountain. As the level of the water rises, it threatens to isolate and engulf the animal now stalled upon the tree; the other animal, still fleeing toward the heights, reaches, on the contrary, a higher and more secure position.
The animal on the tree stands for an inferior species that has earlier attained a fixed form; the other represents a higher species
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 49
that has continued to evolve; but the animal upon the mountain never was on the tree at all, because, if he had mounted it and become caught there, he would have lost his chance of continuing on his way. In other words, the higher species never was the lower species, since the characteristics of the latter are already fixed.
Some eloquent comparisons might be drawn from the social life of to-day. We are all of us spurred on to choose as early as possible some form of employment that will place us in a secure and definite place at the great banquet of existence. The idea of continuing to follow an indefinite and uncertain path, leading upward toward the heights is far less attractive than the safe and comfortable shelter of the shady tree that rises by the wayside. The same law of inertia applies to every form of life. Biological evolution bears witness to it, in the /orms of the different species; social evolution, in the forms of the professions and trades; the evolution of thought, in the forms of the different faiths. And whoever first halts in any path of life, the path of study, for instance, occupies a lower place than he who continues on his road.
The salaried clerk, armed only with his high-school certificate, has an assured income and the pleasures of family life, at a time when the physician, with an independent profession, is still strug- gling to establish a practice. But the obscure clerk will eventu- ally hold a social position below that of the physician; his income will always be limited, while the physician may acquire a fortune. Now, the clerk, by adapting himself to his bureaucratic environ- ment, has acquired certain well-defined characteristics; we might even say that he has become a representative type of the species, clerk. And the same will be true of the physician in his independ- ent and brilliant life as high priest of humanity, scientist and man of wealth. Both men were high-school students, and now they are two widely different social types; but the physician never represented the type of clerk; or, in other words, he did not have to be a clerk before he could be a physician; on the contrary, if he had been a clerk, he never could have become a physician. It is somewhat after this fashion that we must conceive of the sequence of species in evolution. It follows that man never was an anthro- poid ape, nor any other animal now living around us. Nor was the man of the white race ever at any time a negroid or a mongo- lian. Consequently, the theory is untenable which tries to ex- plain certain morphological or psychic malformations of man, on
50 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
the principle of atavism — because no one can inherit if he is not a descendant.
So, for example, reverting to our previous comparisons, if the animal on the mountain should climb a tree, or if the physician should become pedantic, this would not prove that the animal from the mountain was once upon a time the animal in the tree, nor that the physician recalled, by his eventual pedantry, certain by-gone days when he was a clerk.
The theories of evolution seemed for a time to illumine and definitely indicate the origin of man. But this illusion has so far resulted only in relegating to still deeper darkness the truth that the biologists are seeking. We do not know of whom man is the son.
Even the earlier conceptions regarding the mechanics of evolu- tion are essentially altered. The mystery of the origin of species, like that of the mutability of forms, has withdrawn from the forms that are already developed, and taken refuge in the germinal cells; these cells in which no differentiation is revealed, yet in which the future organism, in all its details, exists in a potential state; in which, we may even say, life exists independent of matter, are the real laboratorium vitce. The individual, in developing, does noth- ing more than obey, by fulfilling the potentiality of the germs.
The direction of research has shifted from the individual to its germs. And just as the early Darwinian theories evolved a social ethics, seemingly based upon the facts of life, to serve as a guide in the struggle for existence, so in the same way, to-day, there has arisen from the modern theories a new sexual ethics, founded upon a biologic basis.
The Phenomena of Heredity. — The most interesting biological researches of to-day are in regard to the hereditary transmission of characteristics.
To-day the phenomena of heredity are no longer absolutely obscure, thanks to the studies of Mendel, who discovered some of its laws, which seemed to open up new lines of research prolific in results. Yet even now, although this field has been invaded by the most illustrious biologists of our time, among others, De Vries, Correns, Tschermack, Hurst, Russell, it is still in the state of investigation. Nevertheless, the general trend of researches relative to Mendel's laws is too important to permit of their enlightening first steps being neglected by Anthropology.
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 51
The first phenomena observed by Mendel, and the ones which led him to the discovery of the laws of heredity which bear his name, were revealed by a series of experiments conducted with peas.
Exposition of the Phenomena of Hybridism. — If two strains of peas are crossed, one of them having red flowers and the other white flowers, the result in the first generation is, that all the plants will have red flowers, precisely similar to those of one of the parent plants.
Accordingly, in hybridism, the characteristic of one of the parents completely hides that which is antagonistic to it in the other parent. We call this characteristic (in the case cited, the red flowers), dominant; in distinction to the other characteristic which is antagonistic to the first and overcome by it; namely, the recessive characteristic (in the present case, the white flowers). This is the law of prevalence, and constitutes Mendel's first law, which is stated as follows:
MendeVs First Law: ''When antagonistic varieties or charac- teristics are crossed with each other, the products of the first generation are all uniform and equal to one of the two parents."
This result has been repeatedly reached in a host of researches, which have experimentally established this phenomenon as a law.
Thus, for example, if we cross a nettle having leaves with an indented margin, with a nettle having leaves with a smooth margin, the product of the first generation will all have leaves with in- dented margins, and apparently identical with the parent plant having indented margins, in other words, having the character- istic that has proved itself the dominant one (Russell) .
These phenomena discovered by Mendel have been observed in many different species of plants, such as wheat, Indian corn, barley and beans.
They have also been verified in certain animals, such as mice, rats, rabbits, caveys, poultry, snails, silk-worms, etc. One of the most typical experiments was that of Cuenot, who, by crossing ordinary mice with jumping mice, obtained as a result a first generation composed wholly of normal mice; the characteristic of jumping was thus shown to be recessive.
Notwithstanding that the first generation is apparently in every way similar to the parent with the dominant character, there is in reality a difference.
52 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Because, if we cross these hybrids together, we meet, in the second generation, with the following phenomenon : to every three individuals possessing the dominant character, one is born having the recessive character. To go back to Mendel's first example, that of the peas with red flowers (dominant) and with white flowers (recessive), we find, by crossing together the hybrids of the first generation, that for every three plants with red flowers, there is one plant with white flowers.
And similarly, the crossing of hybrid nettles with indented leaves will result in a second generation composed of three plants with indented leaves to every one with smooth-edged leaves (see Fig. 5).
Doddrtu+jitkhfera
W^ jL
Gen.
H «il* 1114 ii
Fig. 5.
That is, the characteristics which belonged to the first two parents all survive, even though in a latent form, in the descen- dants; and they continue to differentiate themselves in well established proportions. In one offspring out of four, the charac- teristics of the grandfather, which have remained dormant in the father, once more reappear. This intermittent heredity of
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 53
characteristics, that are passed from grandfather to grandson, overleaping the father, is one of the best-known laws of path- ological heredity in man; and it is called atavistic heredity, to dis- tinguish it from direct heredity, which denotes the transmission from parent to offspring. But no explanation had ever been found for this sort of phenomenon. Undoubtedly, it must be connected with the phenomena of Mendelism.
Accordingly, in the second generation Mendel's second law has been established, the law of disjunction, which is stated as follows :
MendeVs Second Law: "In the second generation obtained by reciprocal fertilisation of the first hybrids, three quarters of the offspring will exhibit the dominant character, and one quarter the recessive"
MendeVs Hypothesis, Designed to Explain the Phenomena of Heredity. — Mendel's great service is to have conceived a hypoth- esis that seems to have disclosed the key adapted to unlock all the secrets of heredity.
While the body of an individual is the resultant of forces so mutually exclusive that the appearance of one characteristic means the disappearance of its antagonist; in the development of the sexual cells the two antagonistic characters are distributed in equal proportion. That is to say, one-half of the male cells contain the dominant character, and one-half the recessive; and the same holds true for the female cells. The characters of the two parents, in other words, never merge in the reproductive cells, but are distributed in equal measure, independently of the question whether they are dominant or recessive. Thus for example: in the case already cited of the first hybrid generation of the peas with red flowers, in every one of the plants, without distinction, half the pollen has potentially the red character and half has the white; and in the same way the female cells have, half of them a red potentiality and half of them a white. Such hybrids of the first generation, therefore, although apparently similar to the parent with red flowers, differ in their germinative powers, which are not made apparent in the individual. And the same may be said of hybrid nettles with indented leaves, etc.
Granting Mendel's hypothesis, we have on the one hand pollen and on the other seed ready to come together in every manner in- cluded within the range of possible combinations ; the individual is, in its characteristics, nothing else than the product of a combi-
54
PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
nation which must necessarily manifest itself in accordance with the well-known mathematical laws of probability.
For instance, let us proceed to diagram the possible disposition of the sexual cells of the hybrids of peas, all of them having red flowers. In terms of percentage, they will give, out of every hundred, fifty red and fifty white.
P = pollen; O = ova; jB = red, dominant; ty = white, recessive: The possible number of combinations between the pollen grains and the ova are four; namely, RR, Rw, wR, ww. But where a dominant characteristic encounters a recessive (Rw, wR), the recessive disappears, to make way in the individual for the domi- nant characteristic alone. The definitive result is three individuals of dominant character, to one of recessive character.
{50 R
{50 W-*^
{50 R ^ {50 W
RR R
RW R
Fig. 6.
Nevertheless, the hybrids of dominant character are not all equal among themselves. Those belonging to the combination RR, indeed, are permanent in character and in all respects alike, and they reproduce the original red-flower progenitor. The other red-flower hybrids, belonging to the groups Rw and wR are, on the contrary, similar to the hybrids of the first generation and contain reproductive cells differentiated in character; such hybrids, if reciprocally fertilised, will again give three dominant offspring to every one recessive; that is, they will obey the law of disjunction. The hybrids belonging to the fourth group, on the contrary, are constant, like those of the first group, and are permanently of recessive character; and they will reproduce the original pro- genitor with white flowers.
The same results may be attained with nettles with smooth
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 55
and indented leaves, and with all other types of plant and animal life that obey the laws of Mendelism.
The figure given actually represents the third generation of nettles; from a combination corresponding to RR, there result only indented leaves, and from another combination corresponding to our WW there result only smooth-edged leaves, and from the two mixed groups there come three offspring with indented leaves to every one with smooth leaves.
It is possible to represent, by means of a general diagram, the mathematical succession of characteristics in hybrids, after the following manner; denoting the dominant character by D, and the recessive by r.
In each successive generation, provided the fertilisation takes place only between uniform individuals, as indicated in the diagram, and as may be effected by actual experiment with plants,
^^^
v/
-/^
l.D. 2.D. r
JJ). 2.D.r l.r
r First crossing of individuals with antagonistic characters.
First generation of hybrids, all alike, and simi- lar to the progenitor D (dominant).
Second generation: for each recessive there are three dominant: but of these only one is permanent.
Third generation: disjunction of the hybrid groups takes place and new permanent groups are formed.
Fig. 7.
groups identical with the original progenitors will continue to be formed, through successive disjunction of the hybrids; the sexual phenomenon operating in obedience to the laws of probability.
An effective experiment, that anyone may repeat for himself, is the one originated by Darbishire. He took two boxes, typifying respectively the male and female organ, and placed in them black and white disks of equal size, so distributed that each box contained fifty disks of each colour. After mixing these disks very carefully, he proceeded to take at random one disk at a time alternately from each box; and he piled up each pair of disks in such a manner
56 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
that the black ones should be on top and the white underneath. The result was that for every three black disks on top of the piles there was one white disk; but of the black groups one consisted of two black disks, while in the other two the lower disk was white. This is simply one of the many games dependent on the laws of probability.
Now, supposing that instead of one, there are two character- istics that are in antagonism; in that case, we have the occurrence of double hybridism (dihybridism).
Let us take the strains of peas already considered, but let us choose for observation the character of their seed. One of the plants has round seed and yellow cotyledons; and the other angular seed and green cotyledons. These two characteristics, therefore, are both inherent in the seed; condition of surface (rough, smooth), and colour (green, and yellow).
After fertihsation, Mendel's first law, that of the prevalence of the dominant character, will operate, and all the plants of the first generation will have round seed and yellow cotyledons. Hence these are the dominant characteristics, which we will represent by capital letters: R (round), Y (yellow), to distinguish them from the recessive characteristics, which we will designate with small letters: q, (angular), and g (green).
According to Mendel's hypothesis, all these hybrids with round seed and yellow cotyledons, contain sexual cells of opposite poten- tialities, numerically equal and corresponding to the antagonistic characters of the parent plants. That is, they must have in their pollen grains and their ovarian cells all the possible combinations of their different potentialities.
They should produce in equal quantities:
pollen grains (P) with round seed and yellow cotyledons: R Y
|
a n |
green |
R g |
|
angular " |
yellow |
a Y |
|
ii ii |
green |
a g |
|
ovarian cells (0) with round " |
yellow |
R Y |
|
11 ii |
green |
R g |
|
angular |
yellow |
a Y |
|
a it |
green |
' a g |
The total number of combinations that may result is sixteen; that is, each one of the four combinations of pollen may unite with any one of the ovarian cells; thus constituting four groups
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 57
of four. And these groups represent the combinations (of pollen and ova) capable of producing individuals:
|
R Y - |
- RY = RY |
aY - |
RY = RY |
|
R Y - |
- R g = RY |
aY- |
R g = RY |
|
R Y - |
- a Y = RY |
aY - |
a Y = a Y |
|
R Y - |
-a g = RY |
aY - |
a g = a Y |
|
R g - |
- RY = RY |
a g - |
RY = RY |
|
R g - |
- R g = R g |
a g - |
R g = R g |
|
R g - |
-a Y = RY |
a g — |
a Y = a Y |
|
R g - |
-a g = R g |
a g - |
a g = a g |
[JdV
Fig. 8.
Every time that a dominant characteristic encounters a reces- sive one (R with a or F with g), it overpowers and hides it: conse- quently the results of the different combinations are quite definitely limited as determining forms of different individuals. In fact, the results of the sixteen combinations are as follows :
|
R Y |
R Y |
|
R Y |
R Y |
|
R Y |
a Y |
|
R Y |
a Y |
|
R Y |
R Y |
|
R g |
R g |
|
R Y |
a Y |
|
R g |
a g |
58 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
That is to say, the only forms which occur are the following:
RY,Rg a Y, a g
whose relative probability of occurrence is :
RY 9 times in 16 = 56.25%
R g 3 times in 16 = 18.75%
a Y 3 times in 16 = 18.75%
a g 1 time in 16 = 6.25%
Now, as a result of actual experiment, the forms obtained show the following relative percentage:
Results of experimenta according to the combinations
with plants and laws of probability
R Y 56.5% 56.25%
R g 19.75% 18.75%
a Y 18.2% 18.75%
a g 5.8% 6.25%
The correspondence between these figures is close enough to warrant the acceptance of Mendel's hypothesis as the true inter- pretation of the phenomena that are shown to take place within ths sexual cells; the germinal cells of the hybrid contain potentialities belonging to one or the other only of the parents, and not to both; one-half of the cells contain one of these potentialities, and the other half the other potentiality.
But in the phenomena of hybridism, we have seen the results of another fact which determines Mendel's third law; the Law of the Independence of Characteristics.
That is, that while the original progenitors had angular seed and green cotyledons, and round seed and yellow cotyledons, certain hybrid plants inherited the round seed of the one and the green colour of the other; or the angular seed of the one and the yellow colour of the other. In the same way, it may happen, for example, that the colour of one plant may combine with the height of another, etc. That is, that each separate characteristic of the progenitor is independent and may combine with the characteris- tics of the other progenitor — even to the point of separating the colour from the form, as in the case cited.
What we find in hybrids, then, is not a separation into two types of generative cells, considered as united and complex entities; but every separate germ cell may break up into as many different potentialities as there are separate characteristics in the individual;
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 59
and that, too, not only as regards the separate minute parts of the individual body, but, within the same organ, as regards the shape, colour, character of the surface, etc.
Such phenomena of Mendelism cannot as yet be generalised; yet it has already been established by a host of experiments that a great number of characteristics obey the laws of Mendel, such, for example, as the character of the hair or plumage; the gra- dations of colour, the abundance or absence of hair; physical malformations, such as cerebral hernia in poultry; the character of locomotion, as in the jumping mice: and even normal physio- logical attributes connected with the epoch of maturity in certain plants.
But the manner in which the dominant character asserts itself is not always uniform. There are times when a fusion of antago- nistic characters takes place. Thus, for example, when two varie- ties of the mirabilis jalapa are crossed, one having red flowers and the other white, a fusion of the colours takes place in the first generation, and all the plants have pink flowers. In the second generation we get, for every plant with red flowers, two with pink flowers and one with white. That is, the law of disjunction has again asserted itself, but the individual hybrids merge their antago- nistic attributes, which remain, nevertheless (as their differentiation proves), separate one from the other in the sexual cells.
Another phenomenon observed in individual hybrids is the in- termingling of characteristics. For instance, there are cases where the flowers of a hybrid produced by a plant with red flowers and another with white are variegated with red and white stripes.
Accordingly, the transmission of antagonistic attributes through the individual may be divided into three different methods :
[ Exclusive. Transmission ^ By fusion.
[ By intermingling.
In the first case, the character of one of the parents is trans- mitted intact; in the second, the formation of a new characteristic results, constituting a form more or less nearly midway between those from which it comes and whose fusion it represents; in the third case (which is very rare and seems to obey Mendel's laws in quite an uncertain way), the result is a mosaic of the fundamental attributes.
60 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Of special interest to us are the two first methods of hereditary transmission of characteristics. Even before Mendel's discoveries, anthropologists had observed that in the intermixture of races certain human attributes remained distinct while others merged. In the first case they called the individuals hybrids, and in the second case they called them metics. Take, for example, the colour of the skin when black and white merge in the so-called mulatto.
Other characteristics, instead of merging, intermingle, as for instance those that are internal or related to the skeleton, and those that are external or related to the soft tissues and the skin. It may happen, for example, that where one race has an elongated head and black hair and another has a round head and blond hair, the result of their union will be hybrids with elongated heads and blond hair or vice versa. Similarly, if one of the parents is tall of stature and fair complexioned, and the other of short stature with a dark skin, these characteristics may be interchanged in the hybrids. A very common occurrence, as regards the colour of the hair, is the fusion of blond and brunette into chestnut; while parents with chestnut hair may have either fair-haired or dark- haired children. In his book entitled Human Races and Varieties, Sergi says in regard to hybridism: '^It is impossible to ignore human hybridism, which, for that matter, has been demonstrated under various forms by all the anthropologists; America, in itself alone, offers us a true example of experimental anthropology in regard to this phenomenon. Already the result of investigations shows that human hybridism is multiform among all the peoples of the earth; but what is best known of all is the exchange of external characteristics and their intermingling with the internal; that is, the combination of external characteristics of one type with internal characteristics of another type. It is easy, for in- stance, to find cases in which a certain colour of skin and hair, with the special qualities proper to them, are found combined with pe- culiarities of the skeleton that do not rightfully belong to types of that particular colouring, and vice versa; and this same phenom- enon may be observed regarding certain separate attributes, and not all of them — such as the stature, or the face with its outer covering of soft tissues, or the shape of the skull alone.
''If we observe our European populations, that call themselves a white-skinned race, but whose whiteness has many different gra- dations, we are convinced of the great intermixture of characters,
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 61
and, what is more, a varied mixture resulting in a great variety of individual types, consisting of characters differing widely from one another. It requires a very accurate and very minute analysis to distinguish the different elements that are found in the compo- sition of ethnic characters in individuals and peoples. Undoubt- edly these intermixtures and combinations of character differ in their constituent elements and in the number of such elements in the different nations, according to whether we study those of the south, or the centre, or the north of Europe; and this results from different degrees of association with mongrel races.
''But a more important fact, and one that seems to have escaped the attention of anthropologists, is the absence of fusion of internal and external characteristics in the product of such inter- mixture. We find only a positional relationship between the dif- ferent ethnic elements, a syncretism or superposition of characteris- tics, and a consequent readiness to disunite and form other unions. This phenomenon has already been demonstrated in America, on a mass of evidence; but it is apparent also in Europe, among the peoples that are seemingly most homogeneous, if by careful obser- vation we separate the characteristics that constitute the ethnic types; and not only the types, but the individuals belonging to the different peoples."
And in the following passage, Sergi expresses himself still more clearly :
''From my many observations, it follows, further, that human hybridism, or meticism, as others choose to call it, is a syncretism of distinct characteristics of great variety, and that these do not modify the skelital structure or the internal characteristics, ex- cepting by way of individual variation; it may happen that sepa- rate parts of the skeleton itself acquire characteristics peculiar to themselves. The stature, the chest formation, the proportion of the limbs, may all be in perfect correlation and be united with external characteristics of diverse forms, as for instance with differ- ent forms of cranium, or the cranium may be associated with differ- ent facial forms, and conversely. Furthermore, the forms adapted separately and in part in hybrid composition remain unvaried in their typical formation. The face retains its typical characteristics in spite of its union with different forms of cranium; and similarly the cranium preserves its architectural structure when combined with different types of face. The stature maintains its propor-
62 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
tions in spite of combinations with diverse cranial and facial types, and in spite of varied colours of skin and hair."
The foregoing page, that I have borrowed from this masterly- investigator, is most eloquent testimony that, in regard to the phenomena of hybridism, man also comes within the scope of Mendel's laws. There is something wonderful in the power of observation and intuition shown by Sergi, who, running counter to the convictions of the majority of anthropologists, arrived through these conclusions at a truth the key to which was destined to be discovered later on through studies, very far removed from anthropology, such as were pursued by the botanists Mendel and De Vries. While Mendel was led by his experiments to the dis- covery of the laws based upon his ingenious hypothesis, Sergi was drawn simply by observation to conclusions that to-day are con- firmed by experience. And from difficult observations of single characteristics taken separately, Sergi demonstrated, in his ingenious studies, their persistence through innumerable generations; while, through the identification of separate characteristics, he achieved that brilliant analysis of the races which revealed to his anthro- pological insight that the European varieties of man originated among the peoples of Africa and Asia. Unquestionably, the laws of Mendel confirm what hitherto were considered, in the scientific world of Europe, simply as the individual hypotheses of Sergi, but which American anthropologists recognise and welcome as a scientific truth, brilliantly observed and expounded by the Italian anthropologist.
Thus, through single characteristics, through particularities, we may read the origins of races; and recognise which are the con- stant characteristics and which the transitory ones.
Accordingly, let us keep these principles in mind, as we pro- ceed further in our investigation of the phenomena of heredity.
Mendel's laws, however much they may be discredited or illumi- nated by further experience, serve in the meanwhile to give an absolutely new conception of the individual and to shed light upon many obscure problems relating to heredity.
The individual is the product of a combination of germ poten- tiahties, which, in the case of hybrids (and consequently always in the case of man, who is the product of racial intermixture) , meet in accordance with the mathematical laws of probability. One might almost conceive of a formula, or, better yet, a calculation,
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 63
in accordance with which the individual resulting from any given germs might be predetermined; if it were not for the fact that the calculations would become infinitely complicated through the multiplication of characteristics. With only ten pairs of characteristics it is already possible to form upward of 1024 kinds of germinal cells and these give rise to 1,000,000 different combinations.
Furthermore, through the law of dominant characteristics, the combinations of germs would produce in the descendants 1000 varieties distinguishable by their external appearance, and 60,000 differing only internally, that is, in their germinal cells.
There remains, however, one general principle: the individual contains not only his personal attributes, but also other attributes which belonged to his ancestors, and which are latent in him, and may reappear in his descendants. Consequently, if the individual is a hybrid, he must be interpreted not only through himself alone, but through the history of his family; and the characteristics which he may transmit are not those of his own body, but those of his origin.
The individual body is nothing more than a "temporary ex- pression" of those germinal characteristics which have united to give it consistency; but the complex transmission of character- istics rests wholly with the germinal cells. The problem of heredity is transferred from the individual and from the series of individ- uals, who are simple and transitory products of combinations, to the sexual cells and their potentialities. And this is unquestionably an absolutely new scientific concept, and a revolutionary one as well, capable of drawing in its wake a lengthy evolution of thought. Since the germinal potentialities determine the single character- istics, they may be considered as the atoms of the biologist. ''The field of investigation," says Bateson, "does not appear to differ greatly from that which was opened to the students of chemistry at the beginning of the discovery that chemical combinations are
governed by definite laws In the same way that the
chemist studies the properties of every chemical substance, the characteristics of organisms ought to be studied, and their com- position determined." {First Report, p. 159).
This brings us to two widely diverse facts that demand con- sideration: first, the subdivision of antagonistic characteristics in the germinal cells that form, so to speak, the atomic and chaotic
64 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
substratum of characteristics — characteristics that combine accord- ing to the mathematical laws of probability; and, secondly, the dominance of characteristics, or else their fusion, which, independ- ently of anything that may happen in the germinal cells, serves to determine and define the individual.
What sort of characteristics are the dominant ones?
According to the latest researches of Mendelism, the domi- nant characteristics are those acquired latest in the course of evolu- tion, in other words, the youngest, or, if you prefer, the most highly evolved. Accordingly, in hybrids, the most perfected character- istics and forms are the ones that triumph in the end.
This is quite a new principle. Hitherto it was held that the pure species or race was the most perfect; and the hybrid or bastard was under a cloud of contempt. And, as a matter of fact, the first crossings of different races may result in some combinations lack- ing in harmony, and calculated to sanction the old-time conception of the aesthetic inferiority of the bastard.
But it is necessary to leave time for new generations and further crossings, in order that all of the more highly evolved characteristics may unite and end by triumphing in reciprocal harmony. This the followers of Mendel cannot yet give us, because it would require decades or centuries, according to the species, to produce experi- mentally such aesthetic forms of hybridism.
But in the human race we have an experiment already. accom- plished, which actually shows us the (Esthetic triumph achieved in the region where the races have for the greatest length of time been crossed and recrossed, through the agency of the most an- cient civilisation: the Europeans surpass in physical beauty the people of any other continent; and the Neo-Latin races, the most ancient hybrids of all, seem to be nearing the attainment of the greatest aesthetic perfection. In fact, when I was engaged in compiling an anthropological study of the population of Latium, in accordance with Sergi's principles, and was making a most minute examination of all the different characteristics and their prevalence, as a possible basis for a delineation of the fundamental racial types, I found that complete beauty is never granted to any one race, but distributed among different races: ''as a result of my labours, I find perfect artistic proportion as to certain facial features, in a race having inferior hands and feet; and, vice versa, I find facial irregularities in the race having the smallest ex-
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 65
tremities, and the most artistically proportioned hands. What we now consider as standards of human beauty, and delight in bringing together artificially in a single figure in a work of art, are found in nature scattered and distributed among different races." (See Physical Characteristics of Young Women of Latium, p. 69.)
Upon the combination of all the different points of beauty in a single individual depend Quetelet's biological theories of the medial man (I'homme moyen), lately revived and extensively developed by Viola. The new importance acquired by the recon- struction of the medial man is due precisely to the fact that the new method of reconstructing him is by bringing together all the single characteristics taken separately and worked out mathemat- ically according to the laws of individual variations that behave precisely like those of probability. (See Biometry and the Theory of the Medial Man.)
Viola considers, in its relation to the physiological laws of health, the combination in a single individual of the maximum number of average characteristics, which at the same time are the characteristics numerically prevalent in individuals (dominant characteristics?). The man who accumulates the greater number of average characteristics, escapes diseases and predisposition to disease; he is consequently sounder and more robust and hand- somer. De Giovanni, on the contrary, through an ingenious conceit, bestows the name of morphological combination upon the union in a single individual, of parts that are mutually inharmonic and incapable of performing their normal functions together, in consequence of which such an individual's morphological person- ality is predisposed to special maladies.
Accordingly the meeting and union of germinative poten- tialities may be either more or less propitious; as for instance the result sometimes produced by the combination of a platyopic (broad) face and an aquiline and extremely leptorrhine (narrow) nose; in other words, combinations that are discordant from the aesthetic standpoint, but harmless as regards health; or again, there may be a lack of harmony between the internal organs, incom- patible with a healthy constitution. There may even exist mal- formations due to the meeting of forms that clash violently; each of which parts may be quite normal, when considered by itself, but cannot adapt itself to the other parts with which it is united.
66 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
It is as though the dominant characteristic in respect to an organ had been overpowered by another, which ought on the contrary, in this special case, to have been recessive.
It is precisely on this question of the dominance of charac- teristics that the researches of the Mendelists are at present being expended. It has been observed in the course of experiments that there exist certain special correlations between potentialities, in consequence of which certain characteristics must always go together; as, for example, when two characteristics, having once been united, must continue to recur together, although they each exist separately. These laws, which are not yet clearly deter- mined, may serve to explain the final harmony of the sum total of individual attributes.
But in general the dominance of characteristics is not absolute, but subject to many causes of variation, associated with environ- ment. Thus, for example, just as a change in nutrition of a young plant will result in a different height, it is also possible in the mechanics of reproduction that the original relations of germs may be altered by external causes, and the dominant character- istics be made recessive.* Many deviations are attributable to the influences that act upon the germinative cells of hybrids, after the latter have already been determined in their potentiality; thus for example when certain germinal cells are less resistant during maturation; or again when combinations between poten- tialities are difficult to achieve. That is to say, there may exist certain phenomena associated with environment, thanks to which Mendel's natural laws concerning the dominance of character- istics may become inverted.
Another fact of great significance is this : that, in the course of extensive experimental plantings, for the purpose of verifying the laws of Mendel, a widespread sickliness and mortality occurred among cryptograms, at the expense of the plants of recessive character; which would go to prove that a lower power of resist- ance accompanies the appearance of recessive characteristics. The dominant characteristics accordingly are not only the most highly evolved, but they also possess a greater power of resist- ance. So that, to-day, the dominance of the strong tends through the workings of the phenomena of Mendelism, to do away, little by little, in the course of generations, with characteristics that are
* CoKBENS: Concerning the Laws of Heredity.
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 67
weak or antiquated. This has an important bearing upon human pathology, because it opens the way to hope for a possible regener- ation in families branded with hereditary disease.
The germinal potentialities that contain beauty and strength seem predestined to that predominance which will achieve the triumph of life in the individual. To learn the laws of the union, in one individual and definitive unity, of the infinite dominant and recessive potentialities that must encounter one another in the mysterious labyrinth in which life is prepared — therein lies the greatest problem of the present day.
It is that which should constitute our guiding purpose.
Form and Types of Stature
The Form. — Fundamental Cannons regarding the Form. — Types of Stature, Macroscelia and Brachyscelia; their physiological Significance. — Types of Stature in relation to Race, Sex, and Age.
A few years ago, when anthropology first began to be studied, the skull was taken as the point of departure ; because in the ana- lytical study of the human body it represents the principal part. Indeed, the same thing was done by Lombroso, when he applied anthropology to the practice of psychiatry and later to the study of criminals. It is a matter of fact that degenerative stigmata of the gravest significance are to be found associated with the skull; and this he could not fail to take into account, because of its bear- ings upon criminal anthropology.
But to-day anthropology is reaching out into vaster fields of science and striving to develop in diverse directions, such as those of physiology and pathology; and revolting from the collection of degenerative details, it undertakes to study normal man in regard to his external form as related to his functional capacity, or else the man of abnormal constitution, who in his outward form reveals certain predispositions to illness; and starting on these lines, it proposes to investigate principally the metamorphoses of growth, through the successive periods of life.
From this new point of view, it is not any single malformation, but the individual as a whole in the exercise of his functions, who assumes first importance. The study of the cranium (formerly so important as to be the basis of a special science, craniology), becomes only one detail of the whole. As a matter of fact, the
68 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
brain, which is what gives the cranium its importance, is not only the immediate organ of inteUigence, but it is also the psychomotor organ; and as such exercises control over all the striped muscles, and is morphologically associated with the development and the functional powers of the whole body.
It follows that, the larger the body, the bigger brain it needs to control it, independently of the question of intelligence. There- fore the first point of departure should be eminently synthetic, and should include the morphological personality considered as a whole.
One of the properties of living bodies is that of attaining a determinate development, whose limits, both in regard to the quantity of its mass and the harmony of its form, are defined by that biological final cause which is implanted in the race and trans- mitted by heredity. Consequently every living creature has determinate limits: and these constitute a fundamental biological property.
The causality of such limits has not yet been determined by scientific research ; nevertheless it is a phenomenon over which we must pause to meditate. If the philosopher pauses to contem- plate the immensity of the ocean from the sea shore, marvelling that the interminable and impetuous movement of the waves should have such exact and definite limits that it cannot overpass by so much as a metre the extreme high-water line upon the beach, we may similarly pause to meditate upon the material limits that life assumes in its infinitely varied manifestations.
From the microbe to the mammal, from the lichen to the palm, all living creatures have inherited these limits, which permit the zoologist and the botanist to assign to each a measure as one of its descriptive attributes.
This is the first attribute which we must take into consideration in the study of anthropology: namely, the mass of the body, and together with the mass, its morphological entirety. The Italian vocabulary lacks any one word which quite expresses this idea, [and in this respect English is scarcely more fortunate*]. The stature which represents to us the most synthetic measure of the body in its entirety (a measure determined by the vertical linear distance between the level on which the individual's feet are placed, up to the top of his head as he stands erect), does not
* Translator's note.
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 69
represent the entire body in the sense above indicated. It may rather be considered as a linear index of this entirety. The French language, on the contrary, possesses the word taille, which may be rendered in ItaUan by the word taglia [and in Enghsh by the word form *], provided that we understand it to signify the conception of the whole morphological personality.
No single measurement can express the form; the weight of the body, indeed, may give us a conception of the mass but not of the shape; and the latter, if it needs to be determined in all its limits, requires a series of measurements, mutually related, and signifying the reciprocal connection and harmony of the parts with the whole; in other words, a law. We may establish the following measurements as adapted to determine the form, in other words, as fundamental laws: the total stature, the sitting stature, the total spread of the arms, the circumference of the thorax, and the weight. Of these measures, the two of chief importance are the stature and the weight, because they express the linear index and the volumetric measure of the entire body. The other measurements, on the contrary, analyse this entirety in a sweeping way: thus, the sitting stature, in its relation to the total stature, indicates the reciprocal proportions between the bust and the lower limbs; the perimeter of the chest records the transverse and volumetric development of the bust; and the total spread of the arms denotes a detail that is highly characteristic in the case of man: the development of the upper limbs, which, while they correspond to organs of locomotion in the lower animals, assume in the case of man higher functions, as organs of labour and of mimic speech.
Such measurements constitute a law, because they are in con- stant mutual relationship, when the normal human organism has reached complete development. The stature, in fact, is equal to the total spread of the arms; the circumference of the thorax is equal to one-half the stature, and the sitting stature is slightly greater than the perimeter of the chest. As regards the weight, it cannot be in direct proportion to any linear measure; neverthe- less, an empirical correspondence in figures has been noted that may be recorded solely for the purpose of aiding the memory: the normal adult man usually weighs as many kilograms as there are centimetres in his stature, over and above one metre (for
* Translator's note.
70 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
instance, a man whose height is L60 metres will weigh 60 kilo- grams, etc.)-
To make these laws easier to understand, we may resort to signs and formulae. Thus, if we denote the stature by St, the total spread of the arms by Ts, the circumference of the thorax by Ct, the essential or sitting stature by Ss, and the weight by W, we may set down the following formulae, which will result in practice in more or less obvious approximations :
Of
St=Ts; Ct = ^; Ct = Ss
And for the weight, the following wholly empirical formula:
W = Kg{St-lm.).
Stature. — Among all the measurements relating to the form, the principal one is the stature. It has certain characteristics that are essentially human. What we understand by stature is the height of a living animal, when standing on its feet. Let us com- pare the stature of one of the higher mammals, a dog for instance, with that of man. The stature of the dog is determined essen- tially by the length of its legs, while the spinal column is supported in a horizontal position by the legs themselves. Such is the atti- tude of all the higher mammals, including the greater number of monkeys, notwithstanding that these latter are steadily tending to raise their spinal column in an oblique direction, in proportion to the lengthening of their fore-limbs, which serve them as a support in walking — a form of locomotion half way between that of quadrupeds and of man. Man alone has permanently acquired an erect position, that renders the bust ( = sum of head and trunk) vertical, and leaves the upper limbs definitely free from any duty connected with locomotion, thus attaining the full measure of the human stature, which is the sum of the bust and the lower limbs. Thus, we may assert that one fundamental difference between man and animals consists in this : that in animals the spinal column does not enter into the computation of stature; while in man, on the contrary, it is included in its entirety. Consequently, in man the stature assumes a characteristic and fundamental im- portance, because part of it (that part relating to the bust) rep- resents, as a linear index, all the organs of vegetative life and of life in its external relations.
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 71
If we examine the human skeleton in an erect position (Fig. 9), it shows us the varying importance of the different parts of its structure, according as they are destined to protect, or simply to sustain. At the top is the skull, an enclosed bony cavity; and this arrangement indicates that it is designed to contain and protect an organ of the highest importance. By means of the occipital foramen, this cavity communicates with the vertebral canal, also rigourously closed, that is formed by the successive juxtaposition of the vertebrae. Such protective formation is in accord with the high physiological significance and the delicate structure of the organs of the cen- tral nervous system, which represent the su- preme control over physi- ological life and over the psychic activities of life in its external relations. Below the skull, the struc- ture of the skeleton is profoundly altered; in fact, the framework of the thorax is a sort of bony cage open at the bottom; still, the external arrangement of the bones renders them highly protective to the organs they enclose, namely, the lungs and the heart — physiological centres, whose perpetual motion seems to symbolise the rhythm and consequently the con- tinuity of life.
Continuing to descend, we come to a sort of hollow basin, the pelvis, which seems merely to contain, rather than protect, the abdominal organs: the intestines, kidneys, etc. Such a structure
Fig. 9.
72 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
seems to be in accord with the minor physiological importance of these organs, whose function (digestion) is periodic and may be temporarily suspended, in defiance of physiological stimuli, without suspension of life. In the lower part of the skeleton, on the contrary, the arrangement between the soft and bony tissues is inverted: the long bones of the limbs constitute the inner part; and they are covered over with thick, striped muscles, organs of mechanical movement for the purpose of locomotion. Here the function of the skeleton is exclusively that of support, and in its mechanism it represents a series of levers.
Accordingly, the structure of the skeleton also shows us how the stature is composed of parts that differ profoundly in their physiological significance; life as a complete whole, the living man, is contained within the bust, which holds the organs of the individ- ual, vegetative life; those of life in relation to its environment, and those of life in relation to the race, namely, the organs of reproduction.
Deprived of arms and legs, man could still live; the limbs are nothing more than appendages at the service of the bust, in all animals; they serve to transport the bust, that is, the part which constitutes the real living animal, which without the limbs would be as motionless as a vegetable, unable to go in pursuit of nourish- ment or to exercise sexual selection.
The embryos of different animals, of a dog, a bat, a rabbit and of man (as maybe seen in Fig. 11) show that the fundamental part of the body is the spinal column, which limits and includes the whole animal in the process of formation.
If we next examine the embryonic development of man, as shown in Fig. 13, we may easily see how the limbs develop, at first as almost insignificant appendages of the trunk, remaining hidden within the curve of the spinal column; and even in an advanced stage of development (15th week), they still remain quite accessory parts in their relation to the whole.
Having established these very obvious principles, we may ask ourselves : of two men of equal stature, which is physiologically the more efficient? Evidently, that one of the two who has the shorter legs.
In other words, it is of fundamental importance to determine the reciprocal relation, in the stature, between the bust and the
Fig. 10. — Gastrula of a sponge. External surface. Internal section.
(Showing the inner and outer primary layers, and the mouth orifice.)
Fig. 11. Dog. Bat. Rabbit.
(From the work by E. Haeckel: Anthropogeny.)
Man.
Fig. 12.
Four skeletons of anthropoid apes.
Man.
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 73
lower limbs, that is, between the height of the bust and the total height of the body.
The height of the bust was called by Collignon the essential stature, a name that indicates the biological significance of this measurement. It may, however, also be called the sitting stature, from the method of taking the measure, which equals the vertical distance from the level on which the individual is seated to the top of his head. The other is the total stature.
Accordingly, in anthropology we may define the physiological efficiency of a man by the relation existing between his two statures,
Fig. 13. 14 days, 3 weeks, 4 weeks, etc. (natural size).
the total and the essential. If we reduce the total stature (which for the sake of brevity we will call simply the stature) to a scale of 100, we find that the essential stature very slightly exceeds 50, oscillating between 53-54; yet it may fall to 47 and even lower, or it may rise above 56. In such cases we have individuals of pro- foundly diverse types, whose diversity is essentially connected with the proportional differences between the several parts of their stature.
Hence, we may distinguish the type of stature; understanding by this, not a measure, but a, ratio between measures, expressed by
74 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
a number; that is, "the type of stature is the name given to the ratio between the essential stature and the total stature reduced to a scale of 100." The number resulting from this ratio, since it indicates the ratio itself, is called the index of stature (See ''Technical Les- sons: on the Manner of Obtaining and Calculating the Indexes"). Manouvrier has distinguished the type with short limbs and pre- ponderant trunk, by the name of brachyscelous; and those of the opposite type, that is, with long legs, by the name of macroscelous; reserving the term mesatiscelous to designate the intermediate type. These types differ not only in the reciprocal relation between the two statures, but in all the recognised laws of the form. The brachyscelous type has a circumference of chest in excess of half the stature, because the trunk is more greatly developed in all its dimensions; and the total weight of the body exceeds the normal proportion in relation to the stature. The contrary holds true of the macroscelous type; their trunk, being shorter, is also narrower, and the circumference of the chest can never equal one-half the stature, while the total weight of the body is below the normal.
Canons of Form
Passing next to a consideration of the total spread of the arms, since there is an evident correspondence between the upper and lower limbs, it follows that in the brachyscelous type the total spread is less than the stature, while in the macroscelous it sur- passes it to a greater or less degree, according to the grade of type; the two types consequently differ in the level reached by the wrist, when the arms are allowed to hang along the sides of the body.
This is a very interesting fact to establish, since at one time it was held that excessive length of arm was an atavistic feature, in other words, an anthropoid reminder. To-day, since the old interpretation of the direct descent from species to species has been abandoned in the light of modern theories of biological evo- lution, we can no longer speak of atavistic revivals. It is true that the anthropoid apes, as may be seen in Fig. 13, have extremely long forelimbs, and that man is characterised by the shortness of his arms, free to perform work and obedient instruments of his brain. But if it happens that certain individual men have excessively long arms, even if they should coincide with an inferior
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 75
capacity for work and social adaptation, such a simple coincidence must not be interpreted by the laws of cause and effect. The modern theories of evolution tend to admit between the anthro- poid apes and man, only a common origin from lower animals not yet fixed in a determined species. So that in phylogenesis men are not considered as the children or grandchildren of apes, but rather their brothers or cousins of a more or less distant degree; and their resemblance must be attributed to a parallel evolution.
Consequently, it is not possible to speak of direct transmission of characters.
Therefore, we must interpret an excessive length of arm, or an excessive shortness, after the same fashion, namely, in its rela- tion to the type of stature, or to the established canons of the form — in other words, as a detail of individual human types.
Let us sum up the three canons in the following table:
|
Mesatisceles |
Brachysceles |
Macrosceles |
|
St = Ts W = K(St -1 m.) |
St > Ts Ss>| Ct>| W > K(St -Im.) |
St < Ts Ss<| W < K(Sr - 1 m.) |
From these measurements are derived certain types of individ- uality which we may now describe in detail.
The brachyscelous type has an excess of bust, consequently a preponderance of vegetative life; the great development of the abdominal organs tends to make a person of this type a hearty eater, a man addicted to all the pleasures of the table; his big heart, abundantly irrigating the body, keeps his complexion constantly highly coloured, if not plethoric. We can almost see this man of big paunch, corpulent, with an ample chest, fat, ruddy, coarse, and jolly; an excess of nutrinient and of blood-supply are favour- able to the ready accumulation of adipose tissue, and as the body constantly grows heavier it steadily becomes more difficult for the undersized legs to support it ; so that inevitably this man will tend to become sedentary, and he will select a well-spread table as his favourite spot for lingering. Whatever elements of the ideal the
76 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
world contains, will escape the attention of this type of man, who is far more ready to understand and engage in commerce, which leads by a practical way to the solution of the material problems of life.
In the other type, on the contrary, the macroscelous, the organs of vegetative life are insufficient and the central nervous system is defective. Such a man feels, even though unconsciously, that the abdominal organs are incapable of assimilating sufficient nutriment, and that his lungs, unable to take in the needed quan- tity of oxygen, render his breathing labourious. His small heart is inadequate for circulating the blood through the whole body, which consequently retains an habitual pallor; while the nervous system is in a constant state of excitation. We can almost see this man, so tall and thin that he seems to be walking on stilts, with pallid, hollow cheeks and narrow chest, suffering from lack of appetite and from melancholia; nervous, incapable of steady productive work and prone to dream over empty visions of poetry and art. The man of this type is quite likely to devote his entire life to a platonic love, or to conceive the idea of crowning an ideal love by committing suicide; and so long as he lives he will never succeed in escaping from the anxieties of a life that has been an economic failure.
It is interesting to examine the types of stature from different points of view : such, for example, as the height of stature, the race, the sex, the age, the social conditions, the pathological deviations, etc.
The Types of Stature According to the Height of the Total Stature. — There exists between the bust and the limbs a primary relation of a mechanical nature, already well known, even before Manouvrier directed the attention of anthropologists to the types of stature. When one individual is very tall and another is very short, the consequence of this fact alone is that the taller of the two has much longer limbs as compared with the shorter. This is because, according to the general laws of mechanics, the bust grows less than the limbs and is subject to less variation.
But notwithstanding this general fact, other conditions intervene to determine the comparative relations between the two portions of the stature. Indeed, Manouvrier exhibits, within his own school, specimens of equal stature but of different types; and further- more, he notes that the inhabitants of Polynesia are of tall stature and have a long bust, while negroes, who are also of tall stature, have a short bust.
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 77
Types of Stature According to Race. — Among the character- istics of racial types, present-day anthropology has included the reciprocal proportions between the two statures. This means that the medium type in the different races is not always contained within the same limits of fluctuation in regard to stature : but some races are brachyscelous, others are macroscelous, and still again others are mesatiscelous. The most brachyscelous race is the Mon- golian, prevalent in the population of China; the most macroscel- ous is the Australian type that once peopled Tasmania. Other races, as for example the negroid, while in a measure macroscelous, approach nearer to the mesatiscelous type, characteristic of the population of Europe. Let us examine the psycho-ethnic charac- ters of these various peoples. The Chinese are the founders of the most ancient of all oriental civilisations, and have established themselves in a vast empire, solid and stable in its proportions, as well as in the level of its civilisation. It would seem as though the Chinese people, having accomplished the enormous effort of raising themselves to a determined civic level, were no longer capable of advancement. Individually, they have a singularly developed spirit of discipline, and are the most enduring and faithful workers; it is well known that in America the Chinese Mongolian does not fear the competition of labourers of any other race, because no others can compete with him in parsimony, in simple living, and in unremitting toil.
The Tasmanians constituted a people that was considered as having the lowest grade of civilisation among all the races on earth. Even English domination failed to adapt them to a more advanced environment, and their race was consequently scattered and destroyed.
Accordingly, we find associated with extreme macroscelia (Tasmanians) an incapacity for civic evolution; and with the corresponding extreme of brachyscelia an insuperable limitation to civic progress. Consequently, the triumph of man upon earth cannot bear a direct relation to the volume of the bust, or in other words, we cannot assume that the man most favour- ably endowed on the physiological side is the one who has the largest proportion of viscera. As a matter of fact, the con- quering race, the race which has set no limit to the territory of its empire nor to the progress of its civilisation, is composed of white men, whose type of stature is mesatiscelous, that is to say.
78 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
representative of harmony between its parts. This conception will serve us in establishing a fundamental principle in morpho- logical biology: namely, that perfectibility revolves around a centre, which represents a perfect equilibrium between the various parts constituting an organism. Hence, in order to determine the deviations of the individual type, we must always start from those central data, which represent, as the case may be, normality or perfection.
Even among the populations of Europe, and within the Italian people themselves, fluctuations occur in the degree of mesati- scelia, approaching to a greater or less degree the eccentric forms of brachyscelia or macroscelia; and such fluctuations are an attribute of race.
We should draw a distinction between a people and a race. The term race refers exclusively to a biological classification, and corresponds to the zoological species. On the other hand, we mean by a people a group of human individuals bound together by political ties. Peoples are always made up of a more or less pro- found intermixture of races. It is well known that one of the most interesting and difficult problems of ethnology is that of tracing out the original types of races in peoples that represent an inter- mixture centuries old. Without entering too deeply into this question, which lies outside of our present purpose, it will suffice to point out that in the people of Italy it is possible to trace types of races differing from one another, yet so closely related as to render them apparently so similar that they might almost be regarded as a single race.
Now, in an anthropological study of mine on the young women of Latium, I succeeded in tracing, within the confines of that region, different racial types that show corresponding differences in degrees of mesatiscelia. Thus, for example, in Castelli Romani there exists in an almost pure state a dark-haired race, short of stature, slender, elegantly modelled in figure and in profile, and showing within the limits of mesatiscelia a brachyscelous tendency, in contrast with another race, tall, fair, massive, of coarse build, which within the limits of mesatiscelia shows a macroscelous tendency, and which is found in almost pure groups around the locality of Orte, that is, on the boundaries of Umbria. It is interesting to note the importance of researches in ethnological anthropology conducted in small centres of habitation. If it is
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 79
still possible to trace out groups even approaching racial purity, they will be found only in localities offering little facility to emigra- tion and to the consequent intermixture of races. The fact that we still find in Castelli Romani types so nearly pure, is due to the isolation of this region, which up to yesterday was still in such primi- tive and rare communication with the capital as to permit of the survival of brigandage. On the contrary, in localities that have attained a higher civic advancement, and in which the inhabitants are placed in favourable economic and intellectual conditions, the facilities of travel and emigration will very soon effect an altera- tion in the anthropological characters of the race. Hence it would be impossible, in a cosmopolitan city like Rome, to accom- plish any useful studies of the sort that I accomplished in the district of Latium, and which led me to conclude that in the small and slender race of Castelli Romani we may trace the descendants of the ancient conquerors of the world: descendants that belong to one variety of the great Mediterranean race, to whom we owe the historic civilisations of Egypt, Greece and Rome.
It would seem that this race, disembarking on the coast of Latium, must have driven back, among the Apennines, the other race, blond and massive, whose pure-blooded descendants are still found in numerical prevalence at Orte, an ancient mediaeval town and a natural fortress from the remotest times, through its fortu- nate situation on the crown of a rocky height, that easily isolates it from the surrounding country (see the ancient history of the town of Orte).
Accordingly, within the limits of mesatiscelia, it appears that the race which in early times won the victory was the more brachy- scelous, i.e., the one which had the larger bust, and consequently the larger brain and vital organs. In other words, within the limits of normality, brachyscelia is a physiologically favourable condition.
Variations of Type of Stature According to Social Conditions. — Independently of race, and from such a radically different point of view as that of the social condition, or adaptation to environment, we may still distinguish brachyscelous and macroscelous types. Brachysceles may readily be met with among the labouring classes, habituated from childhood to hard toil in a standing position, thus interfering with a free development of the long bones of the lower limbs ; while the macroscelous type will be found among the
80 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
aristocratic classes, whose members, spending much time sitting or reclining, give the long bones an opportunity to attain their growth (mechanical theories of stature). Without stopping to discuss the suggested causes of such differentiation in types, we may nevertheless point out that the brachyscelous type is emi- nently useful to society, constituting, one may say, the principal source of economic production, while the macroscelous and unpro- ductive type settles comfortably down upon the other like a parasite. But the progress of the world is not due to the labour- ing class, but to the men of intellect, among whom the prevailing type is the medium, harmonic type, with mesatiscelous stature.
Types of Stature in Art. — The existence of these different individual types, which combine a definite relationship of the parts of stature with the complete image of a well-defined indi- viduality, was long ago perceived by the eye, or rather by the delicate intuition of certain eminent artists. These immor- talised their several ideals, investing now the one type and now the other with the genius of their art. Thus, for example, Rubens embodies in his Flemish canvases the brachyscelous type, robust and jovial, and usually represents him as a man of mighty appetite revelling in the pleasures of the table.
Botticelli, on the contrary, has idealised the macroscelous type, in frail, diaphanous, almost superhuman forms, that seem, as they approach, to walk, shadow-like, upon the heads of flowers, without bending them beneath their feet and without leaving any trace of their passage. Accordingly, these two great artists have admirably realised, not only the two opposite types of stature, but also the psychic and moral attributes that respectively belong to them. But it was not granted to these artists to achieve the supreme glory of representing perfect human beauty in unsur- passed and classic masterpieces. The art of Greece alone succeeded in embodying in statues which posterity must admire but cannot duplicate, the medial, normal type of the perfect man.
Variations of Stature According to Sex. — It is not always neces- sary to interpret the type of stature in the same sense. Even from an exclusively biological standpoint, it may lend itself to profoundly different interpretations.
Thus, for example, the type of stature varies normally according to the sex. Woman is more brachyscelous than man; but the degree of brachyscelia corresponds to a larger development
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 81
of the lumbar segment of the spinal column, which corresponds to the functions of maternity.
In fact all the various segments of the spinal column show different propor- tions in the two sexes.
As we know,. the spinal column consists of three parts ; the cervical (correspond- ing to the neck), the thoracic (corresponding to the ribs), and the abdominal, including the os sacrum and the coccyx.
Now, Manouvrier, reducing the height of the spinal column to a scale of 100, expresses the relations of these different parts in the two sexes as follows :
|
Segments |
Men |
Women |
|
Cervical |
22.1 58.5 11.4 7.9 |
23.9 |
|
Thoracic |
55.4 |
|
|
Lumbar Sacro-coccygeal |
23.7 6.7 |
In woman the thoracic segment is shorter and the abdominal is longer than in man; but the total sum in woman is relatively greater in proportion to the whole stature.
In a case like this we have no right to speak of a morphological or psychosocial superiority of type; nor would a fact of this sort have any weight, for example, in establishing the anthropological superiority of woman. Nevertheless, it may be asserted that, if the day comes when woman, having entered the ranks of social workers, shall prove that she is socially as useful as man, she will still be, in addition, the mother of the species, and for that reason preeminently the greater producer.
Now, it is beyond question that this indisputable superiority is in direct relation with the type of stature. But without insist- ing unduly on a point Uke this, we should note the connection between the brachyscelous type and the tendency shown by women to accumulate nutritive substances, adipose tissue; con- sequently, as compared with man, she is the more corpulent — as are all brachysceles as compared with macrosceles.
Types of Stature at Different Ages. — Another factor that influ- ences the types of stature is the age; or rather, that biological force which we call growth.
Growth is not an augmentation of volume, but an alteration in form; it constitutes the ontogenetic evolution, the development
82
PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
of the individual. The child, as it grows, is transformed. If we compare the skeleton of a new-born child with that of an adult, we discover profound differences between the relative proportions of the different parts. The child's head is enormously larger than that of the adult in proportion to its stature; and similarly, the chest measure is notably greater in the child. If we wish to compare the fundamental measurements of the new-born infant with those of the adult, we get the following figures, on a basis of 100 for the total stature :
|
Adult |
Child at birth |
||
|
Total stature = 100 |
Essential stature Perimeter of thorax. . . . Height of head |
52 50 10 |
68 70 20 |
0
z
e e
JO
2
6 8
20 2 4 6 8
50 2 * 6 8
z
If
6 8
SO
2 A- 6 6 60 2 4- 6 6
4-
6
8
80
6
6
6
JOO
S 3 -^ e 6 7 8 9 ^O // 72 J<3 /■f /ff /S /r
Fig. 14.
Accordingly, the child has to acquire, in the course of its growth, not only the dimensions of the adult, but the har- mony of his forms; that is, it must reach not only certain de- termined limits of dimension, but also a certain type of beauty.
Among the funda- mental differences be- tween the new-born child and the adult one of the first to be noted is the reciprocal difference of propor- tion between the two statures. The child is ultrabrachyscelous, that is, he presents a
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 83
type of exaggerated brachyscelia, calling to mind the form of the human foetus, in which the limbs appear as little appendages of the trunk. In the course of growth, a successive alteration takes place between the reciprocal proportions of the two parts, so that the lower limbs, growing faster than the bust, tend to ap- proach the total length of the latter. Godin has noted that during the years before puberty the lower limbs acquire greater dimensions, as compared with the bust, than are found in the fully developed individual ; in other words, at this period a rapid growth takes place in the long bones of the lower limbs, and accordingly at this period of his life the individual passes through a stage of the macroscelous type. Immediately after puberty, there begins, in turn, an increase in the size of the bust, which regains its normal excess over the lower limbs, thus attaining the definite normal type of the adult individual. After the age of 17 years, by which time these metamorphoses have been com- pleted, the individual may increase in stature, but the propor- tions between the parts will remain unaltered. In Fig. 14 we have a graphic representation of the relative proportions between the height of the bust and the length of limbs at different ages, the total stature being in every case reduced to 100. The upper portion of the lines represents the bust, and the lower portion the limbs, while the transverse line corresponding to the number 50 indicates one-half of the total stature. From such a table, it is easy to see how the bust, enormously in excess of the limbs at birth, gradually loses its preponderance.
It was drawn up from the following figures calculated by me:
|
TYPES OF STATURE ACCORDING TO AGE IN YEARS |
|||||||||||||||||
|
At birth |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
|
|
68 |
65 |
63 |
62 |
60 |
59 |
57 |
56 |
55 |
55 |
54 |
53 |
53 |
52 |
52 |
51 |
51 |
52 |
Godin furnishes the following figures, relating to the type of stature at the period preceding and following puberty:
84
PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
RATIO OF SITTING STATURE TO TOTAL STATURE REDUCED TO SCALE
OF 100 (GODIN)
|
Age |
13 1/2 |
14 |
14 1/2 |
15 |
15 1/2 |
16 |
16 1/2 |
17 |
17 1/2 |
|
Ratio . . . |
52 |
52 |
51 |
51 |
51 |
52 |
52 |
52 |
52 |
Hrdlicka has calculated the index of stature for a thousand white American children and a hundred coloured, of both sexes, and has obtained the following figures, some of which, based upon an adequate number of subjects, (10-13 years) are what were to be expected, while others, owing to the scarcity of subjects (under 6 and above 15 years) are far less satisfactory:
PROPORTION BETWEEN THE SITTING STATURE AND THE TOTAL
STATURE (American Children)
|
Age in years |
Number of subjects of each age |
Males, white |
Females, white |
Number of subjects of each age |
Males, coloured |
Females, coloured |
|
3 |
1 |
60.8 |
59.5 |
|||
|
4 |
— |
• — |
— |
1 |
— |
58.9 |
|
5 |
2 |
57.4 |
57.3 |
3 |
57.3 |
57.9 |
|
6 |
15 |
56.6 |
57.4 |
5 |
55.9 |
55.6 |
|
7 |
38 |
56.3 |
57.2 |
5 |
54.9 |
55.4 |
|
8 |
56 |
55.9 |
56.2 |
13 |
55.1 |
53.3 |
|
9 |
62 |
55.2 |
55.9 |
25 |
54.2 |
54.1 |
|
10 |
98 |
54.6 |
54.2 |
12 |
54.9 |
53.7 |
|
11 |
99 |
54.0 |
55.0 |
12 |
52.8 |
63.8 |
|
12 |
93 |
53.5 |
54.1 |
10 |
57.7 |
54.0 |
|
13 |
86 |
52.9 |
63.8 |
13 |
62.9 |
51.9 |
|
14 |
53 |
52.7 |
54.1 |
7 |
62.3 |
51.8 |
|
15 |
20 |
53.1 |
53.7 |
6 |
51.7 |
53.0 |
|
16 |
9 |
52.0 |
55.0 |
2 |
53.0 |
— |
|
17 |
3 |
52.2 |
54.7 |
— |
— |
— |
Which goes to prove (in spite of the inaccuracies due to the numerical scarcity of coloured subjects of any age) that the females are more brachyscelous than the males; and that the blacks are more macroscelous than the whites.
The above table of indices of stature was worked out by Hrdlicka from the following measurements :
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 85
SITTING STATURE
|
Age in |
Males, |
Females, |
Males, |
Females, |
|
years |
white |
white |
coloured |
coloured |
|
3 |
476 |
476 |
||
|
4 |
— |
— |
— |
534 |
|
5 |
551 |
576 |
597 |
571 |
|
6 |
595 |
608 |
616 |
607 |
|
7 |
631 |
621 |
630 |
625 |
|
8 |
644 |
635 |
659 |
671 |
|
9 |
672 |
663 |
679 |
680 |
|
10 |
684 |
687 |
697 |
695 |
|
11 |
711 |
718 |
718 |
703 |
|
12 |
728 |
734 |
797 |
792 |
|
13 |
751 |
770 |
737 |
767 |
|
14 |
764 |
809 |
787 |
808 |
|
15 |
777 |
825 |
753 |
819 |
|
16 |
839 |
824 |
795 |
— |
|
17 |
864 |
850 |
TOTAL STATURE
|
Age in |
Males, |
Females, |
Males, |
Females, |
|
years |
white |
white |
coloured |
coloured |
|
3 |
783 |
839 |
||
|
4 |
— |
— |
— |
906 |
|
5 |
961 |
1004 |
1044 |
985 |
|
6 |
1051 |
1060 |
1101 |
1091 |
|
7 |
1120 |
1086 |
1147 |
1127 |
|
8 |
1152 |
1130 |
1196 |
1260 |
|
9 |
1212 |
1187 |
1251 |
1257 |
|
10 |
1248 |
1267 |
1271 |
1295 |
|
11 |
1315 |
1304 |
1360 |
1307 |
|
12 |
1362 |
1357 |
1381 |
1467 |
|
13 |
1420 |
1431 |
1392 |
1477 |
|
14 |
1449 |
1495 |
1505 |
1559 |
|
15 |
1462 |
1535 |
1455 |
1545 |
|
16 |
1615 |
1498 |
1500 |
— |
|
17 |
1654 |
— |
— |
— |
|
18 |
— |
1554 |
— |
" |
The following chart, prepared by MacDonald, on the growth of the total stature and the sitting stature of male white children,
86
PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
born in America, gives a very clear idea of the rhythm of each of the two statures. The sitting stature increases quite slowly, and its greatest rate of growth is immediately after puberty (from 15 to 17 years) (Fig. 15)
Mac Donald.
|
m m VI 7Si- 751 128 111 em 612 SU 631 595 |
m m? |
/ |
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A^e 6 7 8 9 W J1 12 13 n 15 16 17 |
Fig. 15.
Lastly, in order to make this phenomenon still more clear, I have reproduced an illustration given by Stratz, consisting of a series of outlined bodies of children representing the proportions of the body at different stages of growth; and not only the pro-
CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 87
portions between the bust and the lower Hmbs, but also between the various component parts of the bust, as for instance the head and trunk. The transverse lines indicate the changes in the prin- cipal levels: the head, the mammary glands, and the bust
(Fig. 16).
The different types of stature at different ages deserve our most careful consideration, yet not from the point of view already set forth regarding the different types in the fully developed individual. In the present case for instance, we cannot say of a
Fig. 16.
youth of sixteen that, because he is macroscelous he is a weakling as compared with a boy of ten who is brachyscelous ; nor that a new-born child represents the maximum physical potentiality, because he is ultra-brachyscelous. Our standards must be com- pletely altered, when we come to consider the various types as stages of transition between two normal forms, representing the evolution from one to the other. At each age we observe not only different proportions between the two fundamental parts of the stature, but physiological characteristics as well, biological signs of predispositions to certain determined maladies, and psychological characteristics differing from one another, and each
88 PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
typical of a particular age. From the purely physical and mor- phological point of view, for example, a child from its birth up to its second year, the period of maximum brachyscelia and con- sequent visceral predominance, is essentially a feeding animal. After this begins the development of psychic life, until finally, just before the attainment of full normal proportions, the function of reproduction is established, entailing certain definite character- istics upon the adult man or woman. In accordance with its type of stature, we see that the child from its birth to the end of the first year shows a maximum development of the adipose system together with a preponderance of the digestive organs; while the adolescent, in the period preceding puberty, shows in accordance with his macroscelous type of stature, and reduction in the relative proportion of his visceral organs, a characteristic loss of flesh.
These evolutionary changes in the course of growth having been once established, it