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Author : Le Bon Gustave
Title : On the Present Formation of a Race in the Tatras Mountains
Year : 1882

Link download : Le_Bon_Gustave_-_On_the_Present_Formation_of_a_Race_in_the_Tatras_Mountains.zip

In our previous article devoted to the state of anthropology in France, we examined the results that the current methods applied to the study of races had provided and could provide. We demonstrated the extreme insufficiency of these methods, and showed that professed anthropologists, with the pretense of embracing all the sciences, hardly troubled themselves during their travels but to measure skulls and skeletons; that the majority of the measurements asked for by these travellers were entirely useless and caused them to waste precious time.1 We pointed out that it is silly to believe that one knows something of a people just because one measured sorne bones, that many more important studies assert themselves to the attention of such travellers. We finally arrived to this conclusion that, in order to assemble accurate and comparable records concerning the physical, intellectual and social state of the human races, there was urgency to draft in the form of a questionnaire very simple instructions. The approval that the most authoritative anthropologists have expressly given to these notions, and the weakness of the criticisms formulated against them by professed craniologists, little anxious to see the uselessness of their research diwlged, only serve to confirm us in the principles that we have set forth. Setting aside for now theoretical considerations, we shall proceed to consider the practical side of the question and investigate how anthropology can be carried out abroad. Until the above simple instructions of which we have spoken exist, we believe it useful to indicate what arefrom our personal experiencethe data that a traveller can easily collect on a human agglomeration visited by him. It is evident that depending on the special knowledge of the traveller and the populations he observes, the questions to study can be vastly different; but, for each people there is a common ground that the reader can easily make out and which is important to know. lt is only, moreover, by way of suggestion that we have given the indications that will be seen to follow. ...