the necessity that the delicate and judicial work of combining the truth which is revealed to each and of rejecting that which is false, should fall to those who lie beyond the reach of national prejudice. Writers in England—Beddoe and Isaac Taylor—have so far been most successful in this comprehensive work. It is now essayed for a third time in the series of papers upon the Racial Geography of Europe, which begins in this number. The Monroe doctrine forbids that we should intermeddle in European politics. The effect of this political neutrality should be to keep our hands free and our minds clear in science. In itself it furnishes a justification for our foreign intrusion into the European field.
During the civil war, while the first great investigation upon living men was being prosecuted upon nearly a million recruits in our armies, the United States held a proud place of leadership in that branch of the science of anthropology which deals with our own race in the life. This tremendous task exhausted all our energies at the outset; attention was directed to the American aborigines, and the white man was forgotten. This is one of several reasons competent to explain the popular ignorance and scientific neglect among us of a very live subject. To the average American reader, the word anthropology, if it conveys any meaning at all, conjures up visions of Indians, Hottentots. Fijians, and other savages, or perhaps of museums and curiosities, of Peruvian and Egyptian mummies, cave-dwellers, and the like so—far have primitive ethnology and archæology dominated the science.
Another reason why we in America have passed by this line of inquiry is because the conditions here have not invited research. Our own population is so recent, so artificial, such a hodge podge of all civilized peoples, that science stands aghast at the problem of finding order in such chaos. In Europe all is, or was until recently, quite different; so that even now, after the railroad and the factory have disturbed the racial peace of the continent, the remnants of law and order still remain.
A special feature of this series of papers will consist of the maps and portraits with which the articles will be amply provided. Every portrait will be accompanied by precise data, obtained from measurements on the living subject. The leading experts all over Europe, among them Drs. Ammon in Baden, Beddoe in England, Collignon in France, Livi in Italy, Janko in Hungary, Kollmann in Switzerland, Ranke in Bavaria, and others, have kindly aided in this work; so that a large collection of racial portraits of permanent value will be presented. With these will be combined all the anthropological maps of value already published, as well as many entirely new ones. Each of these has been especially prepared for this purpose, indicating the exact distribution of each type of man or physical race trait, shown in portrait and described in text. By this means it is hoped that the interests of true science may be subserved; and that at the same time a necessarily technical subject may be rendered comprehensible and interesting to the general reader.
In the first paper of the series, printed in this number, the relation of language to race and nationality, with the changes it undergoes through the distribution of population and the influence of environment, are considered. The next paper will deal with the shape of the head as an ethnic characteristic; the third with the color of the hair and eyes—that is to say, with the distri-
