relating to the American Museum of Natural History in New York are
given: Total floor space, 294,000 square feet, divided as follows:
Exhibition space, 196,000 square feet; laboratories, library, etc.,
42,500 square feet; workrooms, storage, etc., 42,000 square feet;
lecture hall, 13,500 square feet. These figures include the portions
of the building now being completed. The total cost of the museum to
date, including the completion of the new wings, is $3,559,470.15. The
buildings, and the care of them, are provided for by the city of New
York. The expenses of the scientific staff, increase of collections,
etc. (the income for which for the present year is approximately
$185,000), are defrayed from endowments, membership fees, and
contributions. In the capitals of Europe, museum buildings are
generously provided for.
The National Museum building was erected with the view of covering the
largest amount of space with the least outlay of money. In this
respect it may be considered a success. It is, in fact, scarcely more
than the shadow of such a massive, dignified, and well-finished
building as should be the home of the great national collections.
There is needed at once a spacious, absolutely fireproof building of
several stories, constructed of durable materials, well lighted,
modern in equipment, and on such a plan that it can be added to as
occasion arises in the future. The site for such a building is already
owned by the Government; only the building needs to be provided for.
What the Capitol building is to the nation, the library building to
the National Library, the Smithsonian building to the Smithsonian
Institution, the new museum building should be to the National Museum.
There should be available:
Sq. ft.
Department of biology 190,000
Department of geology 83,000
Special laboratories for students 5,000
Rough storage, workshops, etc. 20,000
Lecture hall 6,000
-------
Total 304,000
Present museum space to be devoted
to the department of anthropology 96,000
-------
Grand total 400,000
FUTURE DEVELOPMENT.--With suitable buildings provided, the immediate
development of the National Museum naturally lies in four directions:
(1) The occupation of the present building by the anthropological
collections; (2) the housing, developing, and installing of the large
biological collections; (3) the development of a great museum of
practical geology; and (4) the development of the scientific side of a
National University.
1. The collections in anthropology, as they stand to-day, cover a wide
field in a broken and disconnected way. It is difficult to use them
effectively to illustrate the great features of this branch of
science. They do not present a connected story of the peoples and
cultures of the world. This arises from the gaps in the collections
and the absence of suitable laboratory and exhibition space. This
department should have adequate representations of the American
peoples and their culture, not only of our own country, but of the
whole American continent. Our nation is the only one in America that
can reasonably be expected to do anything of importance toward the
preservation of the materials necessary for the illustration of this
vast field; and as the American race is a unit, of which the tribes in
our own territory constitute a considerable part, it appears to be our
duty to take up this work in a comprehensive way. Thus would be built
up not only a National Museum, but an American Museum in the widest
sense. This applies not only to anthropology, but to the other great
departments of the museum. It will be impossible to carry on such a
work without turning over to the Department of Anthropology the entire
present building, with all its laboratory and exhibition space.
2. The Department of Biology now occupies a large exhibition space in
the Smithsonian building and 55,000 square feet in the museum
building. Large collections are stored in laboratories and inclosed
spaces in the exhibition halls which would be placed on exhibition if
space were available. As has already been explained, in a new building
there should be available for the Department of Biology 190,000 square
feet of exhibition, laboratory, and storage space.
The present exhibit is more complete than that of the other
departments of the museum. Of birds there is a large mounted series,
one of the finest in existence, but it is so indifferently housed that
it fails to make the impression it should. Of mammals there is a good
North American series, and there are some excellent examples of exotic
species. There is a good and rather large exhibit of the various
groups of the lower forms of animals, including an especially fine
series of corals and sponges. These are the only series at present
exhibited which can be considered at all comprehensive. Of the great
groups of fishes, reptiles, and amphibians there is room only for an
outline representation. The wonderful variety of form among insects
can be scarcely more than suggested in the space available. Of plants
there has hitherto been no exhibit worthy of the name, and the space
which it has now been possible to set aside is entirely out of
proportion to the vast extent and importance of this great kingdom of
Nature.
Every natural-history museum of the first class should have at least
two comprehensive exhibition series. The first, the _Systematic
Series_, is a series representing the natural groups, among which all
animals and plants, from the highest to the lowest, are divided. The
second, the _Faunal and Floral Series_, is a series showing the
animals and plants characteristic of each of the grand divisions of
the earth's surface, which naturalists have established as a result of
their study of these two kingdoms of Nature. These two great
comprehensive exhibits should be supplemented by a number of _Special
Series_, illustrating the more interesting phenomena and phases of
life, such as the macroscopic and microscopic structure of animals
and plants and their development from the germ to the fully adult
individual, and special modifications of form and color by which
animals are protected from their enemies; the adaptations for peculiar
environments and modes of life; the characteristics of youth,
maturity, and old age; the variation in form, size, and color among
individuals of the same species; the domiciles and other works
constructed by birds, mammals, insects, and the like. To these series
should be added another of great importance, the _Economic Series_,
representing the animals and plants as related to the activities and
needs of man. Any one of these principal series in its full
development would more than fill the entire space now available.
3. There should be developed a museum of practical geology in the
broadest sense, which will be of service to every producer and
consumer of American mineral products, and to all students of geology
who are engaged in either economic or purely scientific
investigations.
In addition to the series of rocks and fossils illustrating the
stratigraphy and succession of the sedimentary rocks and the
systematic collection of minerals and ores, an exhibit showing how
geologic work benefits the daily life of the people should be
developed. An illustration of this would be a representation of the
artesian-water supply of the semi-arid region, showing the
stratification and structure of the sedimentary rocks, and how
hydrographic and geologic investigations clearly indicate the regions
in which artesian-water development may be carried on successfully.
Mining and areal geology could also be illustrated in such manner as
to place before the student and intelligent observer the import and
value of such work.
In most museums the principal effort has been to make a collection of
useful mineral products. This is desirable, but, from the broad view
of illustrating the practical in addition to the scientific side of
geology, it should be secondary. The best basis for classification on
the practical side of the museum exhibit appears to be the finished
mineral product. For instance, if pig iron be taken as a key material
in classification, the iron ores from which it has been obtained
should be arranged so as to show the various kinds whose combination
has resulted in the pig iron. In connection with this should be
grouped the geologic phenomena, which should include any geologic
conditions connected with the original deposition and the occurrence
of iron ores. This might include the conditions which have led to the
oxidation of pyrite and other sulphur compounds of iron, and to the
development of hydrous oxides of iron; also an illustration of what
has been demonstrated in regard to the solution of widely distributed
minerals in certain rocks, and their subsequent concentration in ore
bodies by metasomatic action. All the metals could be arranged under
such a classification, as also the nonmetallic products. The
preparation of such an exhibit would require many years of work, the
details of which would be considered as each mineral product was taken
in hand.
4. The fourth direction of development is toward the requirements of a
National University, which has already been sufficiently dwelt upon in
this connection.
CHILDREN'S MUSEUM.--The children gain a fair amount of information
from the general exhibit in any well-arranged museum, but it is
desirable that their interest should be aroused by having certain
exhibits made expressly for them. I would have a space set aside in
each of the three departments in which nothing should be exhibited
except for the children. It might be called a Museum Kindergarten.
Some of the preceding suggestions have been adopted by the museum
authorities and partially put into execution, and the carrying of them
out is dependent upon enlarged facilities for laboratory work and
exhibition space. During the administration of Dr. Goode the museum
developed as far as possible under the conditions surrounding it. No
one knew better than he that only by securing new buildings and
expanding the museum could it take the place in America that the
several national museums of Europe have taken in their respective
countries. It is well recognized that a public museum is a necessity
in every highly civilized community, and that, as has been so well
stated by Dr. Goode, "the degree of civilization which any nation,
city, or province has attained is best shown by the character of its
public museums and the liberality with which they are maintained." At
present New York city is, in this respect, in advance of all other
American cities and of the national Government. Whether the latter
will take its proper place by developing the National Museum as it has
developed the National Library remains to be seen. The question
whether they are willing to be represented by the museum as it is
to-day is one that the American people should consider and decide at
an early date; meantime, it is the duty of all interested in the
advancement of science and education to aid by every means in their
power the development of a National Museum that will be truly national
and American.
ARE JEWS JEWS?
BY JOSEPH JACOBS,
PRESIDENT OF THE JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
In the December (1898) and January (1899) numbers of Appletons'
Popular Science Monthly Prof. William Z. Ripley concludes the
remarkable series of articles on the Racial Geography of Europe,
originally delivered as Lowell Institute lectures, by a couple of
articles on the Jews. Strictly speaking, the articles might seem to
have no right in the particular series in which Professor Ripley has
included them, since their main object is to show that the Jews are
not a race but a people, and have therefore no claim to be considered
in the racial geography of any continent. But one can not regret that
a daring disregard for logic has caused Professor Ripley to conclude
his interesting series with the somewhat startling paradox that Jews
are not Jews, in the sense of the word in which both their friends and
their enemies have hitherto taken it. As Professor Ripley has been
good enough to refer to me as having written with some authority on
the subject, and as I have not been convinced by his arguments against
the comparative racial purity of the Jews, I am glad of an opportunity
to discuss the question, which is of equal theoretic and practical
interest.
The theoretic interest, with which alone we need concern ourselves
here, seems to me of two kinds. Professor Ripley, as a student of
anthropology, declares, as the result of his inquiries, that there has
been so large an admixture of round skulls with the (hypothetically
assumed) original long skulls of the Hebrews that all signs of racial
unity have disappeared. I, on the other hand, who have approached the
subject as a student of history,[10] see no evidence of any such large
admixture of alien elements in the race since its dispersion from
Palestine, and have come, therefore, to the opposite conclusion--that
the Jews now living are, to all intents and purposes, exclusively the
direct descendants of the Diaspora. Here, then, anthropology and
history--if Professor Ripley and I have respectively interpreted their
verdicts aright--appear to speak in two opposite senses, and no
conference at La Hague or elsewhere can appoint a court of appeal
which can decide between contrary propositions by two different
sciences.
[Footnote 10: To prevent misunderstanding, I should perhaps add
that I have not neglected the anthropological aspects of the
question. My paper on The Racial Characteristics of Modern Jews,
which appeared in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute
for 1885, contained, I believe Professor Ripley would allow, the
fullest account of Jewish anthropometry collected up to that
date.]
But the point in discussion seems to me to raise also a problem of
exceeding interest within the anthropological sphere itself. Professor
Ripley assumes that round heads beget round heads, and long heads
descend from long heads for all time unchanged. That appears to carry
with it the assumption that no amount of brain activity can increase
the mass of brain, that skull capacity has no relation to mental
capacity, and that alone among the organs of the body the brain and
skull are incapable of growth, change, or development. The _crux_ of
Jewish anthropology raises this problem, as I shall proceed to show,
and, if I have interpreted history aright, offers valuable material
toward its solution.
I might have met Professor Ripley's arguments on narrower grounds,
which would have enabled me to evade this larger question. His main, I
might say his solitary, argument is that contemporary Jews are
predominantly brachycephalic, or round-headed, whereas contemporary
Arabs, whom he takes as the type of the Semites, are as predominantly
dolichocephalic, or long-headed. Accepting Professor Ripley's own
criterion of purity of race, I might point to the almost universal
round-headedness of the Jew as a proof of their racial unity. The fact
that Arabs do not share that quality really does not affect the
question. Linguistically and geographically the Hebrews of history
were associated with the Aramæans and Assyrians of Asia Minor, and
Professor Ripley himself allows that Asia Minor was mainly
brachycephalic. Till Professor Ripley brings forward craniological
evidence that the cephalic index of the ancient Hebrews was below
77.8, his reference to the contemporary Arab must be ruled out of
court. But, quite apart from this, the Arabic evidence would be of
little significance, since the chief characteristic of Moslem
civilization has been the predominance of marriage by capture and
descent from slave concubines. Every caravan that has entered Arabia
for the last twelve hundred years has had its contingent of female
slaves of alien race, mainly from dolichocephalic Africa. I must
confess my surprise that Professor Ripley has based his main argument
on the shifting sands of Arabic racial purity.
The only attempt Professor Ripley makes toward a proof that the pure
Hebrew is dolichocephalic is a half-hearted endeavor to claim that
quality for the Sephardim, or Spanish and Portuguese Jews, descended
in the main from Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal in 1492. As a
matter of fact, the largest number of measurements of Sephardic heads
has been made by Mr. Spielman and myself,[11] and of the fifty-one
heads examined by us only eight were long-headed. Professor Ripley
gives a portrait of a Tunisian Jew, with index 75, who is also
probably of Sephardic origin, like most of the Jews of the
Mediterranean littoral. But, curiously enough, there is far more
evidence for the mixture of race among contemporary Sephardim than of
any other branch of Jews. Even while they were living in Spain as
avowed Jews they were persistently accused of intermarriage, chiefly
with the Moors, while a large number of contemporary Sephardim are
descended not from refugees of 1492, but from the so-called
Marranos--Jews who remained in Spain, professing Christianity and
marrying tolerably freely among the surrounding population. If one
wished to be hypercritical, one could trace the long-headedness of a
minority of Jews to this admixture of race from Spain.
[Footnote 11: On the Comparative Anthropometry of English Jews,
in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1889.]
After all, I must insist that it is to history one must go to
determine a question of this sort. Jews have shown such marked
individuality throughout their career for the last two thousand years
among the nations--they have been so much in the world's eye
throughout that time--that any appreciable degree of intermarriage
would not have escaped notice, both by themselves and by their
enemies. Now there is practically no evidence of this kind during the
Christian era. Religious antipathy has been so strong throughout that
period as to form an almost insurmountable barrier to intermarriage
and the consequent proselytism to Judaism which is necessary for a
valid Jewish marriage. Sporadic cases doubtless occur, but their very
infrequency drew attention to them, and all that historical research
can discover is under one hundred cases throughout the middle ages,
scattered through Europe. Jewish nomenclature has special formulæ to
name the proselyte, and yet, though we have hundreds of the mediæval
lists of Jewish communities and martyrologies, it is the rarest thing
in the world to find one of these names referred to as "sons (or
daughters) of Abraham our father." In earlier days, doctors of the
Talmud, when discussing hypothetical cases, dismissed that of the
proselyte as being so rare.[12] In my Memoir in the Journal of the
Anthropological Institute for 1885 I have taken the marriage
statistics of modern Algeria as most nearly representing the most
favorable conditions that one could imagine at any time during the
middle ages, and have found that during nearly half a century
(1830-'77) there were only thirty mixed marriages out of an average
population of twenty-five thousand Jews--not one a year. The only
instances of proselytism on a large scale are those of the Chozars in
southern Russia, converted to Judaism in the eighth century, and the
Falashas of Abyssinia, about the same time. Yet these are an indirect
proof, by the method of difference, of the comparatively pure descent
of the rest of the Jews, for neither the Karaites, who are the
descendants of the Chozars, nor the Falashas show any of the
characteristic Jewish features or expression.
[Footnote 12: Babylonian Talmud, Gittin, 85a.]
Those who contest the purity of the Jewish race lay great stress upon
the Chozars as forming the nucleus of the Russian Polish Jews, who
are, as is well known, a predominant majority among present-day Jews,
probably ninety per cent of whom either dwell in the Russian dominions
or are descended from former inhabitants of old Poland. Yet against
this is the absence of any reference to Jews in Poland during the time
the Chozars flourished (eighth to eleventh centuries), while the very
speech of the Polish Jews--the so-called "Yiddish," really archaic
German mixed with Hebrew--indicates their true source, the German
kingdoms and principalities. Professor Ripley throws some doubt upon
the possibility of such large numbers as those of the Polish Jews
having been derived from Germany. Nowadays there are probably five
millions of Jews in the regions once possessed by Poland, but the
remarkable fertility of Jews is one of the most striking
characteristics of their vital statistics, to which, indeed, Professor
Ripley has called attention in his remarks upon their vitality. The
development of a generation depends, as is well known, upon the
relative number of deaths under five years of age, and it is just at
this period that Jewish mortality presents so favorable an aspect,
owing to the care of Jewish mothers and the absence of alcoholism
among the fathers. I have estimated that the Jewish population of the
world in 1730 (six generations ago) was only 1,300,000, whereas at the
present moment it is at least nine times as much. If one could assume
the same rate of progress to have existed through the middle ages the
Jewish population in the fourteenth century would have been not much
more than 25,000. Such a rate of progress is, however, extremely
unlikely, considering the large losses by persecution, which in Poland
alone, during the disastrous Cossack inroads between 1648 and 1656, is
said to have removed no less than 180,000 Jews. But, making every
allowance for this disturbance in the rate of progress, it would have
been quite possible for 50,000 Jews who had migrated to Poland in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to increase to over half a million
at the beginning of the eighteenth. Americans, who have seen nearly
half a million Russian Jews land upon their shores within the last
twenty years after crossing nearly half the world, need not be
incredulous as to the possibility of one tenth of that number passing
over the borders between Germany and Poland in a couple of centuries
during the middle ages, when, if means of transit were less numerous,
intensity of persecution and motives for emigration were ten times as
strong as even under the iron rule of the Russian Czar.
History, then, as I read it, has nothing to say against the purity of
descent of contemporary Jews from those of the Bible. What has
anthropology, as interpreted by Professor Ripley, to produce against
this negative evidence of history? Mainly, it would appear, the fact
that Jews of the present day are predominantly brachycephalic. Of the
fact there can be little doubt. The list given by Professor Ripley in
the Popular Science Monthly (vol. liv, page 340), of over twenty-five
hundred heads, would be sufficient to establish this. But the very
uniformity of the index is almost sufficient by itself to refute the
deduction Professor Ripley draws from it. If there had been any
general amount of admixture, that would have tended rather to produce
variety than uniformity. Surely Professor Ripley does not contend that
the Jewish young men and maidens, who, on his theory, so freely
welcomed outsiders into the family circle, have never fallen in love
with long-headed persons of the opposite sex. His argument requires
that the original Jews of the Diaspora were long-headed, and that they
have uniformly intermarried with the broad-headed varieties of the
genus _homo_. Now, he adduces no evidence whatever that Jews
originally were dolichocephalic, and even if he succeeded in proving
this he would have the further difficulty of finding a European race
with skulls so broad as to raise the average index of the race
considerably over 80. If we assume that the original index of the
Jewish skull was 75, Professor Ripley would have to find some race
with an average index of nearly 90 before the mixture would raise the
contemporary Jewish skull to its present broad-headedness. Dr. Ammon
has shown[13] that there are only two small regions in Europe where
such abnormally broad skulls exist, neither of them centers of Jewish
population.
[Footnote 13: Die Natürliche Auslese beim Menschen, Jena, 1883.]