Pedagogical Anthropology

by Maria Montessori

The women of Latium who are dark and dolichocephalic have most beautiful faces, but their hands and feet are imperfect; the brachycephalic blondes, on the contrary, are coarse-featured, while their hands and feet are extremely beautiful. The same may be said regarding their breasts and certain other details. Furthermore, the stature of the dolichocephalics is too low as compared with what is shown to be the average stature, while the brachycephalics are similarly too tall. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to discover racial types of such comparative purity as to establish these differences: it was by a lucky chance that I succeeded in tracing out, at Castelli Romani and at Orte, certain groups of the races that were very nearly pure. The rest of the population are, for the most part, hybrids showing a confused intermingling of characteristics.

In fact, pure types of race no longer exist, least of all where civilisation is most intense. In order to speak of types of race, it is necessary to go among barbaric tribes; and even this is a relative matter, because all the races on earth are more or less the result of intermixture. Yet in civilised countries an occasional group of pure racial stock may be discovered in isolated localities, as though they had found refuge, so to speak, from the vortex of civilisation which is engulfing the races. Throughout the history of humanity we may watch this absorption of racial and morphological characteristics, and the formation of more and more intimate intermixtures, leading to the final disappearance of the original types of race.

When a primitive race emigrated, when men crossed over from Africa to the European coast of the Mediterranean, or Aryans from oriental Asia traversed the mountains and steppes of Russia and the Balkan countries, they were on their way to conquer territory and to subjugate peoples, but they were also on their way to lose their own type, the characteristics of their race. Yet even this sacrifice of race was not without compensation: indeed, it seems as though the race loses through hybridism a large part of its ugly characteristics, but retains and transmits for the most part the characteristics that are pleasing. Unquestionably, the more civilised peoples are better looking than the barbarians, although the history of emigration would seem to indicate an almost common racial origin.

When we remember that in human hybridism the result is not always a true and complete fusion of characteristics, but for the most part an intermixture of them—so that, for example, the hybrid has the type of cranium belonging to one race, and the stature belonging to another race—we have the explanation of the fact that throughout thousands of years certain morphological characteristics have remained fixed, to such an extent as to permit anthropologists to use them as a basis upon which to trace out the origins of races. But these characteristics, while fixed in themselves, are interchanged among individual hybrids, who form more or less felicitous combinations of characteristics belonging to several races.

When we recall what was said in this regard concerning heredity (general biological section) it is necessary to conclude that Mendel's law must be invoked to explain the phenomenon.

Human hybridism, like all hybridism throughout the whole biological field, falls under this law.

But there is still another phenomenon that should be noted: civilised men, who are the most hybrid of all hybrids upon earth, have formed a new type that is almost unique, the civilised race, in which one and all resemble one another. It is only logical to believe that, in proportion as facilities of travel become easier and intermarriage between foreign countries more widespread, it will become less and less easy to distinguish the Englishman from the Frenchman, or the Russian or the Italian; provided that the various hybridisms in the respective countries have developed an almost uniform local type, so that the general characteristics of French hybridism may be distinguished from those of English hybridism, etc.

Even these local hybrid types, determining, as it were, the physiognomy of a people, will disappear when Europe finally becomes a single country for civilised man.

In short, we are spectators of this tendency: a fusion or intermixture of characteristics that is tending to establish one single human type, which is no longer an original racial type, but the type of civilisation. It is the unique race, the resultant human race, the product of the fusion of races and the triumph of all the elements of beauty over the disappearance of those ugly forms which were characteristic of primitive races.