cerity of worship, and is regarded as an end in itself. The ceremonials of religion were originally instituted to edify our spiritual natures, to symbolize high ideals. When people follow these ancient rituals not so much out of a desire to contemplate high ideals of character and service, as to look with curiosity upon the entertaining ceremony and the fashion of others' attire, the practice becomes hollow and meaningless. Formalism is psychically cheap. It substitutes the outer and the more tangible for the inner and the fleeting. It is capable of being held before the mind without the strain of fresh expense of thought and feeling. It is easily impressed upon the multitude.54 Professor McDougall sums up the importance of social heredity as follows:

"The mental constitution of man differs from that of the highest animals chiefly in that man has an indefinitely greater power of learning, of profiting by experience, of acquiring new modes of reaction and adjustment to an immense variety of situations. This superiority of man would seem to be due in the main to his possession of a very large brain, containing a mass of plastic nervous tissue which exceeds in bulk the sum of the innately organized parts and makes up the principal part of the substance of the cerebral hemispheres. This great brain, and the immense capacity for mental adaptation and acquisition implied by it, must have been evolved hand in hand with the development of man's social life, and with that of language, the great agent and promoter of social life. For to an individual living apart from any human society, the greater part of this brain and of this capacity for acquisition would be useless and would lie dormant for lack of any store of

54 Cooley, op. cit., pp. 342-350.

knowledge, belief, and custom to be acquired or assimilated. Whereas animal species have advanced from lower to higher levels of mental life by the improvement of the innate mental constitution of the species, man, since he became man, has progressed in the main by means of the increase in volume and improvement in quality of the sum of knowledge, belief, and custom, which constitutes the tradition of any society. And it is to the superiority of the moral and intellectual tradition of his society that the superiority of civilized man over existing savages and over his savage forefathers is chiefly, if not wholly, due. This increase and improvement of tradition has been effected by countless steps, each relatively small and unimportant, initiated by the few original minds of the successive generations and incorporated in the social tradition through the acceptance or imitation of them by the mass of men. All that constitutes culture and civilization, all, or nearly all, that distinguishes the highly cultured European intellectually and morally from the men of the stone age of Europe, is then summed up in the word 'tradition,' and all tradition exists only in virtue of imitation; for it is only by imitation that each generation takes up and makes its own the tradition of the preceding generation; and it is only by imitation that any improvement, conceived by any mind endowed with that rarest of all things, a spark of originality, can become embodied within the tradition of his society." 55

SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS.

BOAS, F.-The Mind of Primitive Man.
COOLEY, C. H.-Social Organization.

55 McDougall, op. cit., pp. 327-328.

GIDDINGS, F. H.-Descriptive and Historical Sociology. GIDDINGS, F. H.-Democracy and Empire.

GUMPLOWICZ, L.-The Outlines of Sociology.

LE BON, G.-The Crowd.

MCDOUGALL, W.-An Introduction to Social Psychology.

Ross, E. A.-Social Control.

SUMNER, W. G.-Folkways.

TARDE, G.-The Laws of Imitation.

VII

RACES AND PEOPLES

In the thousands of years that elapsed before the historical period began, that continuing tendency to vary which had already differentiated the animal kingdom into genera and species, was operating to differentiate mankind into varieties or races.1 Associated in groups, the early men of the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, moving from one territory to another under the pressure of environmental changes, met and conquered or else intermarried with other primitive racial groups. From this process of association, intermixture, and adaptation to the necessities of climate and geographic environment, certain characteristics emerged as stable physical peculiarities of large populations. To-day we distinguish a yellow-skinned straight-haired race, a black-skinned woolly-haired race, and a fair-skinned curly-haired race.

But before we can identify any population group as a true race we must show that certain traits or stable. physical characters which it possesses are distributed separately, are associated into types, and finally, we must show the hereditary character of these types.2 For example, in the first place, we must show that such a trait as blondness is diffused among large numbers of a population; in the second place, that blondness is more often associated with tall stature than with short stature, thus 1 Giddings, Principles, p. 230.

2 Ripley, W. Z.-The Races of Europe, pp. 104-105.

FIGURE 64. Diagram illustrating Facial Angle, Head Form and Hair Form. Upper cuts: A, prognathic jaws; B, orthognathic jaws. Middle cuts: A, dolichocephalic or long skull, in which width is about 75 per cent. of length; B, brachycephalic or round skull, in which width is about 85 per cent. of length. Lower cuts: A, elliptical cross-section of the woolly, frizzly or kinky type of hair; B, slightly elliptical cross-section of the curly or wavy type of hair; C, cylindrical cross-section of lank or straight type of hair.