purpose. Present members of mankind should be examined and classified regardless of their parentage.
What principle should we adopt in our classification of races? Should we adopt the skin color or hair section or facial or nasal indices, or physiological systems? There is no general agreement on this point. Various classifications have been made on the various principles stated above. Every ethnologist takes one or more of them and rejects the rest, but no one has attempted to lay down a criterion to estimate the value of different principles, to base our preference for one or the other.
Professor Walter F. Willcox of Cornell University gives a course on ethnology in that institution. When I discussed the matter with him he expressed his views on the subject as follows: In biology the species are classified with reference to the relative permanence of different characteristics: the same principle may be applied in ethnology; mankind also should be classified With reference to the degree of permanence of various physical characteristics.
This view has not been expressed by Professor Willcox in any of his articles, still I think this view deserves publication and careful consideration. I have not seen this view expressed in any of the treatises on ethnology, but I regard it as one of vital importance to the science. If it should be adopted by progressive ethnologists (and I think it will be adopted) it would revolutionize the whole science.
If we accept the view of Professor Willcox we must admit that the study of ethnology is yet to begin. No one has to my knowledge carefully investigated the
