Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/450

 436 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

shows that there existed a stiff caste system at Athens based on citizenship, and the Institutes of Gains prove the same condition to have prevailed at RomeJ Royal and noble blood in most of the modern class societies is not permitted to mingle in legiti- mate marriage with common, even where all classes are of identical stock. Artificial and less rigid castes exist in demo- cratic societies in the form of wealth classes, occupational grades, and family distinctions. In fact it is hard to conceive of a society without a certain degree of stratification which limits sexual choice so far as that choice is concerned with marriage. The taboos which in the lower grades of culture restrict human contacts have their counterpart among more advanced societies in the prescriptions which find their sanction in inherited dis- taste for certain types of conduct or status.

Of the groups into which men are divided or divide them- selves, races are at once the most fundamentally natural and the most indefinite. The term race is easily confused with people or nation. One even hears of a Polish as distinguished from a Russian race, or a German race when it is clearly the German people or the German political nation that is in question. Race implies ethnic unity, people cultural unity, nation actual or po- tential political unity. In its narrowest sense race is a purely physical fact. According to Keane it "answers to the breed or strain of cattle- farmers and bird-fanciers, and is therefore appli- cable only to groups sprung, or assumed to be sprung, from one and the same original family."^ Topinard calls races "types hereditaires,"® while Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire defines race as "a succession of individuals born of one another and distinguished by certain characteristics which have become permanent." Like- wise Quatrefages: "Race is an aggregate of individuals resem- bling one another belonging to the same species, having received and transmitted by way of generation the characteristics of a

' Sec. s6.


 * Ethnology, 4, 5.

'Anthropologic ginSrale, 194.