race consciousness. They have been of some service in the attempt to classify races and to distinguish the elements of population in a given region, but every attempt to establish a regular connection between form and function has been disastrous. The best example of the absurdities into which craniometry has led its devotees is Lombroso's criminal type. Lombroso found a number of cranial characters prevailing in criminals, and concluded that an individual in which these characters prevailed was a born criminal. But he measured only criminals, while Bär[1] recently found that precisely the same cranial characters prevailed among normal individuals as among Lombroso's criminals. It thus turns out that the characters which Lombroso found prevailing in criminals are simply those which occur most regularly in the human species, or at any rate in the lower strata of the societies in question. A comparison of the painfully elaborated methods of craniometry fills one with a lively sense of the vanity of all of them; and there is at present a tendency among anthropologists to make their cranial measurements very few and simple.
Craniometry and the determination of brain weight have been pursued in part as aids to the classification of races. But the classification of races has itself thus far proven an ignis tatuus. The question is no nearer solution than when Blumenbach one hundred and twenty years ago made the classic division of five which still stands in school books. Meantime the number has ranged from three to sixty-three; and the latest classification by de Quatrefages into white, black, yellow, and mixed, has no merit except simplicity; for, as no one has insisted more strongly than de Quatrefages himself, no pure race has existed on the earth within historic times. Wherever man has been met, his blood has already been mixed through crossing, migration, and conquest. How this mixture came about, and when, is a question which, if not futile, is of much importance, but there is no occasion at present to modify the impatient expression of Sir Henry Maine, that race theories "appear to have
- ↑ A. Baer, Der Verbrecher in Anthropologischer Beziehung, Leipsic, 1893.
