Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/328

 THE HIERARCHY OF EUROPEAN RACES.

THE significance for the whole group of sociological sciences of the anthropological researches of de Lapouge, Ammon and their co-workers, is becoming more and more manifest. In so far as the contribution that these authors have made toward a science of sociology has consisted of a study of social phenom- ena in connection with the character of population as determined by heredity and survival, there could be little question of its soundness and value. In so far, however, as their conclusions were reached through the method of ethnical analysis, there has been perhaps more room for skepticism. Their sharp division of European populations into three main elements ; still more their characterization of these elements as distinct races ; and most of all their assertions as to the greater capacity and social worth of one of these races as compared with another, may well have seemed startling and questionable to the general reading public, and even to " sociologists " accustomed to classifying popula- tions simply along linguistic or political lines. In fact, even readers versed in ethnological lore found reason to question whether the evidence brought forward was sufficient to justify the broad characterization of racial traits ; and one critic sneer- ingly remarked that the breadth of Lapouge's generalizations was in inverse ratio to the statistical basis on which they rested.

There is a degree of truth in this last pleasantry, in so far as it is a peculiarity of de Lapouge and one of his chief merits as an investigator to discern, as if by intuition, the large sig- nificance of apparently petty data which come under his observa- tion, and to formulate therefrom generalizations that serve at least as working hypotheses to be confirmed, modified or rejected, as the case may be, by subsequent detailed researches. This criticism, however, urged against the conclusions that he and Ammon have drawn as to the character of European races, has