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PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
[Illustration: Maria Montessori]
PEDAGOGICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
BY
MARIA MONTESSORI
AUTHOR OF "THE MONTESSORI METHOD"
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY
FREDERIC TABER COOPER
_WITH 163 ILLUSTRATIONS AND DIAGRAMS_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
MCMXIII
_Copyright_, 1913, by
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign_
_languages, including the Scandinavian_
_July, 1913_
THE.MAPLE.PRESS.YORK.PA.
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 knowledge of the laws
of human life. In contrast to general anthropology 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 conceptions 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
regeneration 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 calculated 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 experimental sciences during the past
century, must result in a correspondingly _transformed man_; or else
civilisation must come to a 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 outline 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 exceedingly 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 consented 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(1)--Modern Anthropology(4)--De
Giovanni and Physiological 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 Evolution(46)--Phenomena of
Heredity(50)--Phenomena of Hybridism(51)--Mendel's Laws(51).
THE FORM AND TYPES OF STATURE
The Form(67)--Fundamental Canons regarding the Form(74)--Types
of Stature, Macroscelia and Brachyscelia; their Physiological
Significance(75)--Types of Stature in relation to Race(77),
Sex(80), and Age(81)--Pedagogic Considerations(88)--Abnormal
Types of Stature in their relation to Moral
Training(91)--Macroscelia and Brachyscelia in Pathological
Individuals (De Giovanni's Hyposthenic and Hypersthenic
Types)(95)--Types of Stature in Emotional Criminals and in
Parasites(101)--Extreme types of Stature among the Extra-social:
Nanism 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)--Stature in relation to Sex(111)--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), Pellagra(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).
CHAPTER II
CRANIOLOGY
The Head and Cranium(187)--The Face(188)--Characteristics
of the Human Cranium(191)--Evolution of the Forehead;
Inferior Skull Caps; the Pithecanthropus; 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 Capacity(242)--Chemistry
of the Brain(247)--Human Intelligence(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)--Anomalies 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 Childbirth(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(312)--The Hand(312)--Chiromancy 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(317)--Lines
of the Palm(318)--Papillary Lines(319).
CHAPTER VI
THE SKIN AND PIGMENTS
Pigmentation and Cutaneous Apparatus(320)--Pigmentation of the
Hair(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)--Anomalies 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 Malformations(344)--Individual
Number of Malformations(347)--Origin of
Malformations(355)--Humanity's Dependence upon Woman(357)--Moral
and Pedagogical Problems within the School(358).
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)--Cephalic 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 Antecedents(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-pedagogical 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
Helguero's Curves(460)--Viola's Medial Man(463)--Human
Hybridism(466)--the Medial Intellectual and Moral
Man(469)--Sexual Morality(473)--Sacredness of
Maternity(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 application 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 knowledge 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 investigate 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 subject: _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 represents
in itself a sum of complex morphological and psychic characteristics,
associated with the species; and which furthermore, during life,
exhibits certain special distinguishing traits resulting from
instincts, habits, migration and geographical distribution.
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 _inspection_, 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 original
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 numerous 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 palaeontological discoveries of _pre-human_ forms, such as the
pithecanthropus, were just so many arguments 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 throughout the entire
field of analytical research, from histology to biochemistry, and
succeeded especially in making a practical application of them in
medicine, Anthropology failed to raise itself from the status of
a pure and aristocratic, in other words, a superfluous science, a
status that prevented it from ranking among the sciences of primary
importance. As a matter of fact, while zoology 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_ considered 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 anthropology slowly evolved a method and,
by doing so, raised itself to the rank of a science, without ever once
being utilised for practical purposes or recognised as _necessary_ as a
supplemental or integral element of other sciences.
One branch of learning which might have utilised 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 procuring 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, splintered 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 painful 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 and 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 significance 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 universal peace, telling them that "history is
the teacher of life."
Modern Anthropology: _Cesare Lombroso and Criminal Anthropology._
_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 performance of an eminent and
practical service.
It was about the year 1855 that Cesare Lombroso applied the
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 abnormalities that bore witness to
a profound and congenital alteration of the entire personality.
Accordingly, for the purposes of _diagnosis_, Lombroso came to adopt a
_somatic_ basis. And his anthropological studies of criminals led him
to analogous results.
The method employed was in all respects similar to the naturalistic
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 principles of the Lombrosian doctrine spread
with a precocious rapidity, it is a matter of common knowledge that
criminals present anomalies 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 as belonging to an inferior type, which,
according 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 painstakingly 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.
And, by deducing certain common characteristics from these 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 biopathological 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 localities (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_ (parasitism 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 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 anthropological for a speculative attitude. Whether the
delinquent should be cured, or simply isolated, or even subjected to
punishment; 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 sentiments
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 individual, 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 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 process 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 redemption and of solidarity, in which all limitations of human
brotherhood 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 accomplished 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 foundation 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 phenomenon 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
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 believe 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 understand
thoroughly, if we wish to undertake the noble task of educators 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 ourselves:
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 physiological 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 particular 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 responsibility 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 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 illustration of that
_physiological determinism_, under whose guidance modern positive
philosophy draws its inspiration.[1]
In the case of criminality, the actions of the degenerate delinquent
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
resultant 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 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 interpretation 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 anthropological
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, analogous to those relating
to penal law.
_Achille De Giovanni and Physiological Anthropology; Anthropological_
_Principles of Physical Hygiene._--Another practical development of
anthropology is that instituted by Professor De Giovanni, 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 description of individuals,
their classification into types, according to common fundamental
characteristics, and the etiological study of their personality. But
while Lombroso took note of malformations 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 predisposition 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 measurements, he seeks to establish the reciprocal relations in
development within the visceral cavities: "the 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 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 attacks of special maladies, such
for example as chronic catarrh of the bronchial tubes or pulmonary
tuberculosis. Whoever, on the contrary, is overdeveloped in abdominal
dimensions, will be subject 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 fundamental physical types.
In place of the ancient classification of temperaments into _nervous_,
_sanguine_, _bilious_ and _lymphatic_, we have to-day as 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 environment 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 majority who pass unharmed along the insidious paths
of adaptation, only a few fall victims to the particular disease to
which some special 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_ _in
relation_ to the anomalies of the physio-morphological personality:
"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 complaint 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 temperaments, 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 predispositions of the organism,
wisely guiding its development, to the final end of achieving an ideal
of health, which depends upon the harmony 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 biosociologic
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 because 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 _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 development. 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 transforming our
prisons into insane asylums? Such scanty fruit might well be compared
to the mercy of that mediaeval lordling 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 development, it should content itself merely with
diagnosing the personality 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 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 generations 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 individualities 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 preconception that they must discover
in every pupil a more or less faithful 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[A] and a Luccheni,[2]
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 Educates." The discussion of this subject
was expected to constitute 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 indignation against
the educators of the people; and as a demonstration of hostility, they
all absented themselves that day from participating in the Congress.
There was something approaching a tumult in the ranks of teachers;
inasmuch as they felt themselves innocent, they protested 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 methods 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 education. 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 modified in any manner. What becomes of these individuals
who, even in childhood, reveal themselves as the future rebels and
enemies 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 protection
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 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 rapidly 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 anthropological 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 characteristics
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 correspond to the
childhood of those abnormal individuals already studied 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 grows;
the body itself not only undergoes an increase in volume, but a
profound evolution in the harmony of its parts and the composition 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 achieving 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 foreshadowed. 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.
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 constitutes 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 concedes 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
punished and merit is rewarded; but in this way we make ourselves the
sycophants of nature and of social error, and not the administrators 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 deficiency. This
child is destined to reap a harvest of praise and rewards; 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 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 flesh 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
degeneration 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. "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. Notwithstanding
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 experimental
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 positively 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
perceive that the scientific material prepared by experimental science
was in reality philosophical material, for which it was only necessary
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 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."[3]
It is this _liberty_ that makes it possible for us to pursue
experimental investigations, without fear that our brains may become
sterile. And by liberty we mean the readiness 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 philosophy 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 _experimental_ 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 themselves by assimilating
the _content_ of one particular branch of learning; and thereby they
define the boundaries of their individual 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.
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 we wish to compare it to some branch of learning
that is universally familiar, we may say that an experimental 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 contemporaries, 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 speculative 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
investigation_. 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
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 illiterate because the
preconception might work upon us by suggestion 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 anthropological 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 consequently 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_
established 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
_standard_ _of comparison_ for our own conclusions. Thus, for example,
when we have measured the stature of a boy of ten, we have undoubtedly
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 literature
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 innumerable 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 preparation. 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 environment, 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 beyond
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 unveil certain secrets of
existence, that will teach us the moral norms of life.
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 _biostatistics_ 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 pedagogical
anthropology is that it has not yet a completely defined content, 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 speculative 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
prophylaxis 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 humanity sought
in vain to protect itself with bare-foot processions and religious
ceremonies, attended by jostling throngs and cruel flagellation; or
else they betook themselves to the shade of eucalyptus trees, in the
midst of malarial lowlands. Entire cities were destroyed by pestilence,
and malarial districts remained uncultured 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 conditions 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; bacteriology
and general pathology are still very far from having completed their
_content_. If we had been obliged to wait for such completion, 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, _by 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 the resistant fibres of a fabric; because,
humanity by engaging collectively in the audacious search after truth,
and by thus protecting the interests of each individual through the
common interests, 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 compilation 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
interest 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, and where it
might be possible to lay practical foundations of a far-reaching reform
in our schools.
Accordingly, I shall repeat myself three times, in these lectures;
first, by setting forth the scientific content, secondly, by expounding
the methods of investigation, and thirdly, by applying in practice 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 instruction 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
_born 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 wait.
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 a novel in a night
undoubtedly squanders his physical powers, like a wind that passes over
arid ground; but one who meditates assimilates 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 contrary, 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 flourishing
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 experience 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
will be shown him in as many different ways as possible--through the
cinematograph, for example. Finally it will be acted 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 the moment when they are reproducing
the scene that these children _feel it_, and it is only then that they
_learn_. But this is not 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 one
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. According 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 geographical 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 handiwork, 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 interested. 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 phenomena, 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 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 purpose 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 consciousness 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 anthropology,
studies man from the naturalistic point of view; but, unlike general
anthropology, it does not concern itself with the philosophic 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, bacteriology 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
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 individual
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). _Variations_
constitute the most important subject of inquiry in pedagogic
anthropology, just as _fixed 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 perfectionment 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, pedagogic
anthropology differs substantially in its declared intentions. These
other two kindred branches endeavour to _diagnose_ the personality
of the individual; we must admit that both psychiatry and general
medical practice profit by the application of anthropology 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 predisposed 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 impoverished, such as criminals and the
diseased. Pedagogic anthropology, on the contrary, embraces _all
humanity_; but it pays special attention to that part of it which
is psychologically superior: the normal human being. Its purpose is
none the less diagnostic; but it regards diagnosis as constituting a
_means_, and not merely indicating 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 pathological 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 anthropology,
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,
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
addition to these, the teachers also are summoned to a vast task of
observation, which, by its continuity, will supplement and complete 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_.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] From a work by E. MORSELLI: _Cesare Lombroso and Scientific
Philosophy_.
[2] MUSOLINO was a brigand, and LUCCHENI an anarchist and regicide.
[3] From a study by Prof. E. Troilo, _Enrico Morselli as a
Philosopher_. In the volume by MORSELLI, MILAN: VALLARDI, 1906.
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 _interpretation_
of the data that have to be gathered according to technical 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 MATERIAL SUBSTRATUM 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 movement of
scission and redintegration; vital metabolism or interchange 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 thought that he had discovered the
_monerae_ 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 improvements 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 protoplasm 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 hemocytes 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
protoplasm 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
substratum 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 (protoplasm) 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 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 (= 1/250 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
transformations 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 unexpected ray of
light, give us a keen impression of their possession of consciousness,
a dim glimmering 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 physical 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 _final cause_ is the tendency exhibited
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 phenomenon.
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 interchange of
matter, namely, _metabolism_, constitutes undoubtedly a phenomenon
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 characteristic 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.[4]
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
leucocytes, 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 algae 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.
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-confidence 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 consequent
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 successive 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 _protective_ 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 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.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.--Human Ovum, Magnified. _a._ Vitelline membrane;
_b._ Vitellus; _c._ Germinal Vesicle.]
He traces his origin to an ovum-cell formed of protoplasm, nucleus and
membrane, measuring 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.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--First Segmentation of a Fertilised Ovum.]
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--A Morula as seen from the Outside.]
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--An Egg and Spermatozoon of the same Species,
about to Fertilise It. Note the difference in the proportional size of
the two cells.]
After the ovum-cell is fertilised, it constitutes 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 anything
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 individual
characteristics--as, for instance, in degenerative inferiority--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 invagination, 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 differentiated into
_tissues_. From the ectoderm are developed the nervous 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 specialised, as for example those of
the cerebral cortex, the fibres of the striped muscles, the hepatic
cells, etc., were originally _embryonic_ 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 destinies that
are profoundly different. This unquestionably constitutes 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 attainment of the _final
cause_ of life. In man, for example, strength, health, beauty, on the
one hand, degeneration on the other, stand in intimate relations with
the _nutrition_ of the embryo.[5]
=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 remains 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 personalities of human
degenerates, he frequently invoked the so-called principle of
_atavism_, in order to explain the reappearance of atavistic 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 organism, 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
assumes a secondary importance, such as that of _directing_ evolution,
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 environment 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 transformations of a
certain plant, the OEnohtera Lamarckiana, without the intervention of
any external phenomenon, admitted the possibility 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.
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; henceforth its further
evolution is ended. In such a case, the oscillations 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 may 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 evolution--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 proportion to
its precocity in attaining fixed characteristics, Rosa conceived 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 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 _forms_
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 struggling to
establish a practice. But the obscure clerk will eventually 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 environment, 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 independent 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 anthropoid 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 mongolian. Consequently, the theory is untenable which tries to
explain certain morphological or psychic malformations of man, on
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 bygone 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 evolution 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
vitae_. The individual, in developing, does nothing 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.
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:
_Mendel's First Law_: "When antagonistic varieties or characteristics
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 indented margins, and
apparently identical with the parent plant having indented margins,
in other words, having the characteristic 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.
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).
[Illustration: FIG. 5.]
That is, the characteristics which belonged to the first two parents
all survive, even though in a latent form, in the descendants; and they
continue to differentiate themselves in well established proportions.
In one offspring out of four, the characteristics of the grandfather,
which have remained dormant in the father, once more reappear. This
intermittent heredity of characteristics, that are passed from
grandfather to grandson, overleaping the father, is one of the
best-known laws of _pathological_ _heredity_ in man; and it is called
_atavistic heredity_, to distinguish 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:
_Mendel's 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."
_Mendel's Hypothesis, Designed to Explain the Phenomena of_
_Heredity._--Mendel's great service is to have conceived a hypothesis
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 included within
the range of possible combinations; the _individual_ is, in its
characteristics, nothing else than the product of a combination 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; _R_ = red, dominant; _w_ = 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 dominant
characteristic alone. The definitive result is three individuals of
dominant character, to one of recessive character.
[Illustration: 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 progenitor with white flowers.
The same results may be attained with nettles with smooth 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_.
[Illustration: First crossing of individuals with antagonistic
characters.
First generation of hybrids, all alike, and similar 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.]
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, 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 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 characteristics 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 fertilisation, 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:
_a_ (angular), and _g_ (green).
According to Mendel's hypothesis, all these hybrids with round seed and
yellow cotyledons, contain sexual cells of opposite potentialities,
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_
" " green " _R g_
angular " yellow " _a Y_
" " green " _a g_
ovarian cells (_O_) with round " yellow " _R Y_
" " green " _R g_
angular " yellow " _a Y_
" " 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 of four. And these
groups represent the combinations (of pollen and ova) capable of
producing individuals:
_R Y - R Y = R Y | a Y - R Y = R Y_
_R Y - R g = R Y | a Y - R g = R Y_
_R Y - a Y = R Y | a Y - a Y = a Y_
_R Y - a g = R Y | a Y - a g = a Y_
_-----------------|-----------------_
_R g - R Y = R Y | a g - R Y = R Y_
_R g - R g = R g | a g - R g = R g_
_R g - a Y = R Y | a g - a Y = a Y_
_R g - a g = R g | a g - a g = a g_
[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
Every time that a dominant characteristic encounters a recessive
one (_R_ with _a_ or _Y_ with _g_), it overpowers and hides it:
consequently 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_
That is to say, the only forms which occur are the following:
_R Y, R g_
_a Y, a g_
whose relative probability of occurrence is:
_R Y_ 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 experiments 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 interpretation of
the phenomena that are shown to take place within the 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 characteristics 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; 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 gradations 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 physiological 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 antagonistic
characters takes place. Thus, for example, when two varieties 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 antagonistic 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
_intermingling_ 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 transmitted
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.
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 instance, to find
cases in which a certain colour of skin and hair, with the special
qualities proper to them, are found combined with peculiarities of the
skeleton that do not rightfully belong to types of that particular
colouring, and _vice versa_; and this same phenomenon 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 gradations,
we are convinced of the great _intermixture_ of characters, 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 composition of ethnic
characters in individuals and peoples. Undoubtedly 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 intermixture.
We find only a positional relationship between the different ethnic
elements, a syncretism or superposition of characteristics, 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 observation 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
skeletal structure or the internal characteristics, excepting by way
of individual variation; it may happen that separate 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 different forms of cranium,
or the cranium may be associated with different 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 proportions 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 discovery of the laws based upon his ingenious
hypothesis, Sergi was drawn simply by _observation_ to conclusions that
to-day are confirmed 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
anthropological 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 constant
characteristics and which the transitory ones.
Accordingly, let us keep these principles in mind, as we proceed
further in our investigation of the phenomena of heredity.
Mendel's laws, however much they may be discredited or illuminated
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 potentialities,
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, 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 expression"
of those germinal characteristics which have united to give it
consistency; but the complex transmission of characteristics rests
wholly with the germinal cells. The problem of heredity is transferred
from the individual and from the series of individuals, 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 characteristics, 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 composition determined." (_First Report_, p. 159.)
This brings us to two widely diverse facts that demand consideration:
first, the subdivision of antagonistic characteristics in the germinal
cells that form, so to speak, the atomic and chaotic substratum
of characteristics--characteristics that combine according to the
mathematical laws of probability; and, secondly, the _dominance_ of
characteristics, or else their fusion, which, independently 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 dominant
characteristics are those acquired latest in the course of evolution,
in other words, the _youngest_, or, if you prefer, the _most highly_
_evolved_. Accordingly, in hybrids, the most perfected characteristics
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 lacking
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
experimentally such aesthetic forms of hybridism.
But in the human race we have an experiment already accomplished,
which actually shows us the _aesthetic 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 ancient 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
extremities, 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
(l'homme moyen), lately revived and extensively developed by Viola. The
new importance acquired by the reconstruction 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 mathematically 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 _handsomer_. 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
personality is predisposed to special maladies.
Accordingly the meeting and union of germinative potentialities 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, incompatible with a healthy constitution. There
may even exist malformations 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.
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 characteristics
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 determined, 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 environment.
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 characteristics be made recessive.[6]
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 potentialities 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
characteristics 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 resistance 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 resistance. 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 weak or antiquated. This has an important
bearing upon human pathology, because it opens the way to hope for a
possible regeneration 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 analytical 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 bearings 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 brain, which is what
gives the cranium its importance, is not only the immediate organ
of intelligence, 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. Therefore
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 transmitted
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 contemplate 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[7]]. 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 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 Italian by the word _taglia_ [and
in English by the word _form_[8]], 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 constant
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; nevertheless, 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 instance, a man whose height is 1.60 metres
will weigh 60 kilograms, 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:
_St_ = _Ts_; _Ct_ = _St_/2; _Ct_ = _Ss_
And for the weight, the following wholly empirical formula:
_W_ = _Kg_(_St_-1 m.).
_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 compare the stature
of one of the higher mammals, a dog for instance, with that of man.
The stature of the dog is determined essentially by the length of its
legs, while the spinal column is supported in a horizontal position by
the legs themselves. Such is the attitude 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 forelimbs, 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 importance, because part of it (that
part relating to the bust) represents, as a linear index, all the
organs of vegetative life and of life in its external relations.
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 rigorously
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 central
nervous system, which represent the supreme control over physiological
life and over the psychic activities of life in its external relations.
Below the skull, the structure 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 continuity of life.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.]
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 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 individual, 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 nourishment or to exercise sexual
selection.
The embryos of different animals, of a dog, a bat, a rabbit and of man
(as may be 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 lower
limbs, that is, between the _height of the bust_ and the _total_
_height of the body_.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.--Gastrula of a sponge.
External surface. Internal section.
(Showing the inner and outer primary layers, and the mouth orifice.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 11.
Dog. Bat. Rabbit. Man.
(From the work by E. Haeckel: _Anthropogeny_.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 12.
Four skeletons of anthropoid apes. Man.]
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.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.
14 days, 3 weeks, 4 weeks, etc. (natural size).]
Accordingly, in anthropology we may define the physiological efficiency
of a man by the relation existing between his two statures, 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 profoundly 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 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 Lessons:
on the Manner of Obtaining and Calculating the Indexes"). Manouvrier
has distinguished the type with short limbs and preponderant 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 surpasses 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 evolution, 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 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
anthropoid 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 relation 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 | St > Ts | St < Ts
| |
Ss = St/2 | Ss > St/2 | Ss < St/2
| |
Ct = St/2 | Ct > St/2 | Ct < St/2
| |
W = K(St-1 m.) | W > K(St-1 m.) | W < K(St-1 m.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
From these measurements are derived certain types of _individuality_
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 nutriment and of blood-supply are favourable 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 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 quantity 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 furthermore, 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.
_Types of Stature According to Race._--Among the characteristics 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 Mongolian, prevalent in the
population of China; the most macroscelous 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 characters 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 favourably endowed on the physiological side is the
one who has the largest proportion of viscera. As a matter of fact,
the conquering 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,
representative of _harmony_ between its parts. This conception will
serve us in establishing a fundamental principle in morphological
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 mesatiscelia,
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 profound 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 intermixture 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 still possible to trace out
groups even approaching racial purity, they will be found only in
localities offering little facility to emigration 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 primitive 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 alteration in the anthropological characters of
the race. Hence it would be impossible, in a cosmopolitan city like
Rome, to accomplish 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 fortunate 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 brachyscelous,
_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 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 eminently useful to society,
constituting, one may say, the principal source of economic production,
while the macroscelous and unproductive type settles comfortably down
upon the other like a parasite. But the progress of the world is not
due to the labouring 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 individuality, was long ago
perceived by the eye, or rather by the delicate intuition of certain
eminent artists. These immortalised 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 unsurpassed 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 necessary
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 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 proportions in the two sexes.
As we know, the spinal column consists of three parts; the cervical
(corresponding 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 | 23.9
| |
Thoracic | 58.5 | 55.4
| |
Lumbar | 11.4 | 23.7
| |
Sacro-coccygeal | 7.9 | 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 insisting
unduly on a point like this, we should note the connection between
the brachyscelous type and the tendency shown by women to accumulate
nutritive substances, adipose tissue; consequently, 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 influences
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 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 | Essential stature | 52 | 68
| | |
= 100 | Perimeter of thorax | 50 | 70
| | |
| Height of head | 10 | 20
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: FIG. 14.]
Accordingly, the child has to acquire, in the course of its growth, not
only the dimensions of the adult, but the harmony of his forms; that
is, it must reach not only certain determined limits of dimension, but
also a certain type of _beauty_.
Among the fundamental differences between the new-born child and the
adult one of the first to be noted is the reciprocal difference of
proportion between the two statures. The child is ultra-brachyscelous,
that is, he presents a 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
approach 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
completed, the individual may increase in stature, but the proportions
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:
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| Number of | Males,|Females,| Number of | Males, |Females,
years|subjects of| white | white |subjects of|coloured|coloured
| each age | | | each age | |
------+-----------+-------+--------+-----------+--------+--------
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 | 53.8
12 | 93 | 53.5 | 54.1 | 10 | 57.7 | 54.0
13 | 86 | 52.9 | 53.8 | 13 | 52.9 | 51.9
14 | 53 | 52.7 | 54.1 | 7 | 52.3 | 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:
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, 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)
[Illustration:
Mac Donald.
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 proportions between the
bust and the lower limbs, 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 principal levels: the head, the mammary
glands, and the bust (Fig. 16).
[Illustration: 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 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 completely 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 typical of a particular age. From the purely physical and
morphological point of view, for example, a child from its birth up
to its second year, the period of maximum brachyscelia and consequent
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 characteristics 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 remains for us to consider the individual variations.
The alterations observed at the various ages, or rather, the notable
characteristics of each age, serve as so many fundamental charts of
the normal average child; and we may consider each successive type
of stature, from the new-born infant to the adult man, in the same
light as we do the average type of the mature mesatiscelous type. In
the case of the latter, we found that both above and below the medium
stature, there were a host of individual types departing more or less
widely from it, and tending toward brachyscelia on the one hand and
toward macroscelia on the other, thus constituting the oscillations of
type in the individual varieties. Similarly, in the case of the medium
type of each successive age we may find brachyscelous or macroscelous
individuals whose complex personal characteristics may be compared to
those already observed in the adult, and may be summed up as follows:
that the macroscele is a weakling; and that the brachyscele may be,
according to the degree of variation, either a robust individual or an
individual that has been arrested in his morphological development, and
retained the type of a younger age.
_Pedagogic Considerations._--From the above conclusion, we may deduce
certain principles that can be profitably applied to pedagogy,
especially in regard to some of the methods suited to our guidance
in the physical education of children. Let us begin with the
happy comparison drawn by Manouvrier, who describes an imaginary
duel with swords between a macroscelous and a brachyscelous type.
The duel, according to social conventions, must take place under
equal conditions: hence the seconds take rigorous care in measuring
the ground, the length of the swords, and determine the number of
paces permitted to the duelists. But since they have forgotten the
anthropologic side, the conditions are not entirely equal: by having
a longer arm, the macroscele is in the same position as though he had
a longer sword; and because he has a greater development of the lower
limbs, the established number of strides will take him over a greater
space of ground than his adversary. Consequently, the conditions as a
matter of fact are so favourable to the macroscele, that is, to the
weaker individual, that the latter has a greater chance of victory. The
brachyscele might, to be sure, offset this by a different manoeuvre
depending on his superior agility; but both he and the macroscele were
trained in the same identical method, which takes into consideration
only the external factor, the arms of defence, and the immutable laws
of chivalry.
Well, something quite similar happens in the duel of life, which is
waged in school and in the outside social environment. We ignore
individual differences, and concern ourselves solely with the _means_
of education, considering that they are just, so long as they are
equal for all. The fencing-master, if he had been an anthropologist,
might have counteracted the probability that the stronger pupil would
be beaten by the weaker, by advising the brachyscele always to choose
a pistol in place of a sword, or by teaching him some manoeuvre
entirely different from that which affords the macroscele a favourable
preparation for fencing. And in the same way, it is the duty of the
school-teacher to select the _arms_ best adapted to lead his pupil on
to victory.
That is, the teacher ought to make the anthropological study of the
pupil precede his education; he should prepare him for whatever he is
best adapted for, and should indicate to him the paths that are best
for him to follow, in the struggle for existence.
But, aside from general considerations, we may point out that something
very similar to the above-mentioned duel takes place in school when,
in the course of gymnastic exercises, we make the children march,
arranging them according to their total height. We expect them to
march evenly and walk, not run, yet we do not trouble to ask whether
their legs are of equal length. When we wish to know which of our
pupils is the swiftest runner, we start them all together, macrosceles
and brachysceles alike, neglecting to measure their lower limbs, the
weight of their bodies, the circumference of their chests. Then we say
"bravo!" to the macroscele, that is, the pupil who is most agile but at
the same time the weakest, and we encourage him in a pride based upon
a physiological inferiority. When we practise exercises of endurance,
we find that certain children weary sooner, suffer from shortness of
breath, and frequently drop out of the contest, in which the victory
is reserved for others. The latter are the brachysceles, who have
big lungs and a robust heart at their disposal. In this case we say
"bravo!" to the brachysceles. Then we try to arouse a noble rivalry
between the two types, encouraging emulation, and holding up before
the brachyscele the example of the macroscele's agility, and before
the macroscele the example of the brachyscele's endurance--and perhaps
we reward the two types with different medals. Such decisions by the
teacher evidently have no such foundation in justice as he supposes;
the diverse abilities of the two types of children are associated with
the constitution of their organisms. A modern teacher ought instead to
subject the brachyscelous child to exercises adapted to develop his
length of limb, and the macroscelous to gymnastics that will increase
the development of his chest; and he will abstain from all praise,
reward, exhortation and emulation, that have for their sole basis the
pupil's complete anthropological inefficiency.
"_The judgment passed by the teacher in assigning rewards and_
_punishments is often an unconscious diagnosis of the child's_
_anthropological personality._"