I Nuovi Indirizzi e le Promesse della Odierna Antropologia

Abstract

THIS little work consists of a series of four lectures which the author delivered as an introduction to his course of anthropology in the 1904-5 session of the University of Bologna, where, after a break of twenty years, he has taken up the work begun by Sergi before his removal to Rome. Appropriately enough, the first lecture of the four deals with Sergi and his principles of skull classification, and sketches very briefly the types and the deductions which Sergi draws from them—Eurasian and Eurafrican forms, and five species of pygmies—at the same time pointing out that many of these views are only provisional. Dr. Frassetto holds that just criteria of race are of the utmost importance, not only for the sociologist, which most inquirers would be prepared to admit, but also for the medical man, who will more readily diagnose the maladies which he has to treat, in proportion as racial morphology and pathology are determined with precision and at the same time it becomes possible to classify the individual patient from an anthropological point of view. If he is too sanguine in this, another point on which Dr. Frassetto insists does not seem beyond the range of practical politics; this is the development of pasdagogic anthropology, which shall regulate the education of the individual child by scientific principles. Even here, however, at any rate in our own case, the problem of feeding the child and of providing it with a healthy body will probably occupy the first place for some time to come, so far as elementary education is concerned.

I Nuovi Indirizzi e le Promesse della Odierna Antropologia.

By Fabio Frassetto. Pp. 71. (Castello: C. E. S. Lapi, 1905.) Price 3 lire.