It is clear therefore that any fears of the arrest and decay of human progress if a particular race should lose in fertility or become absorbed in others, are unfounded. Such alarms may be attributed to egocentric imagination. They resemble the regrets of an individual at the loss which the world will suffer when he dies; what he really fears is his own death. When we loosen the hold of such narrow and essentially personal emotions, and allow our minds to range over the whole of the labors and gradual achievements of humanity, irrespective of millenium or continent, the result is an imperturbed equanimity as to the slight and temporary predominance of this or that racial strain and as to the stability or future of culture. To contribute to this larger tolerance and balance of mind is one of the functions of anthropology.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Ethnography is sometimes separated, as more descriptive, from Ethnology as more theoretically inclined.
[2] The place or “station” Grimaldi must not be confused with the Grimaldi race mentioned below. The grottos at Grimaldi contained two skeletons of Grimaldi racial type and a larger number of Cro-Magnon type. The Grimaldi race is therefore really not the most representative one of the locality Grimaldi; but as it has not yet been discovered elsewhere, there seems no choice but to call it by that name.
[3] It has been maintained that individuals of Cro-Magnon type can still be found in southern France and reckoned as a distinct element in the population of certain districts; but the Cro-Magnon race as such has disappeared.
[4] The usual nomenclature for cephalic index is on the basis of round numbers: broad or round headed or brachycephalic above 80; medium headed or mesocephalic between 75 and 80; narrow or long headed or dolichocephalic below 75. Yet, as the average for mankind is in the neighborhood of 79, this terminology makes far more brachycephalic than dolichocephalic peoples. Groups frequently spoken of as long headed are often really mesocephalic by the accepted definition: a large proportion of Europeans, for instance. It would result in both more accuracy and a better balancing of the limits if the three types of head form were set, as has been suggested, at 81 and 77 in place of 80 and 75.—The index of the skull (strictly, the cranial index) is two units less than that taken on the living head.
[5] On the living, platyrhine noses have an index of breadth compared with length above 85, mesorhine between 70 and 85, leptorhine below 70; skeletally, the same three terms denote proportions above 53, between 48 and 53, and below 48.
[6] The distribution of the races is described as it existed before the era of exploration and colonization that began toward the end of the fifteenth century. Although for practical purposes they have been submerged by Caucasians in the greater part of the Americas, Australia, and South Africa, it is the native races whose distribution is referred to.
[7] Noun incorporation is really an etymological process rather than a grammatical one. In most cases it is the result of a language permitting compounds of nouns with verbs, or verbs with verbs, to form verbs: “to rabbit-kill,” “to run-kill,” and so on. This construction, which is perfectly natural and logical, happens to be so alien to the genius of the Indo-European languages that it has been singled out as far more notable and significant than it deserves. Pronominal incorporation is discussed below (§ [60]).
[8] Recently, certain “rostro-carinate” pre-Palæolithic implements have been much discussed by British archæologists, and in the past year or two there have been some adherents of other nationalities. The implements are referred in part to the Pliocene, that is, late Tertiary, and are said to be accompanied by hearths. The evidence to be adjudicated is technical, and some years will probably elapse before expert opinion settles into tolerable agreement on the authenticity of the objects as artifacts and their age.