Pedagogical Anthropology by Maria Montessori (best novels of all time TXT) 📕

the light of modern theories of biological evolution, we can no longer speak of atavistic revivals. It is true that the anthropoid apes, as may be seen in Fig. 13, have extremely long forelimbs, and that man is characterised by the shortness of his arms, free to perform work and obedient instruments of his brain. But if it happens that certain individual men have excessively long arms, even if they should coincide with an inferior capacity for work and social adaptation, such a simple coincidence must not be interpreted by the laws of cause and effect. The modern theories of evolution tend to admit between the anthropoid apes and man, only a common origin from lower animals not yet fixed in a determined species. So that in phylogenesis men are not considered as the children or grandchildren of apes, but rather their brothers or cousins of a more or less distant degree; and their resemblance must be attributed to a parallel evolution.

Consequently, it is not possible to speak of direct transmission of characters.

Therefore, we must interpret an excessive length of arm, or an excessive shortness, after the same fashion, namely, in its relation to the type of stature, or to the established canons of the form—in other words, as a detail of individual human types.

Let us sum up the three canons in the following table:

Mesatisceles Brachysceles Macrosceles St = Ts St > Ts St < Ts Ss = St/2 Ss > St/2 Ss < St/2 Ct = St/2 Ct > St/2 Ct < St/2 W = K(St-1 m.) W > K(St-1 m.) W < K(St-1 m.)

From these measurements are derived certain types of individuality which we may now describe in detail.

The brachyscelous type has an excess of bust, consequently a preponderance of vegetative life; the great development of the abdominal organs tends to make a person of this type a hearty eater, a man addicted to all the pleasures of the table; his big heart, abundantly irrigating the body, keeps his complexion constantly highly coloured, if not plethoric. We can almost see this man of big paunch, corpulent, with an ample chest, fat, ruddy, coarse, and jolly; an excess of nutriment and of blood-supply are favourable to the ready accumulation of adipose tissue, and as the body constantly grows heavier it steadily becomes more difficult for the undersized legs to support it; so that inevitably this man will tend to become sedentary, and he will select a well-spread table as his favourite spot for lingering. Whatever elements of the ideal the world contains, will escape the attention of this type of man, who is far more ready to understand and engage in commerce, which leads by a practical way to the solution of the material problems of life.

In the other type, on the contrary, the macroscelous, the organs of vegetative life are insufficient and the central nervous system is defective. Such a man feels, even though unconsciously, that the abdominal organs are incapable of assimilating sufficient nutriment, and that his lungs, unable to take in the needed quantity of oxygen, render his breathing labourious. His small heart is inadequate for circulating the blood through the whole body, which consequently retains an habitual pallor; while the nervous system is in a constant state of excitation. We can almost see this man, so tall and thin that he seems to be walking on stilts, with pallid, hollow cheeks and narrow chest, suffering from lack of appetite and from melancholia; nervous, incapable of steady productive work and prone to dream over empty visions of poetry and art. The man of this type is quite likely to devote his entire life to a platonic love, or to conceive the idea of crowning an ideal love by committing suicide; and so long as he lives he will never succeed in escaping from the anxieties of a life that has been an economic failure.

It is interesting to examine the types of stature from different points of view: such, for example, as the height of stature, the race, the sex, the age, the social conditions, the pathological deviations, etc.

The Types of Stature According to the Height of the Total Stature.—There exists between the bust and the limbs a primary relation of a mechanical nature, already well known, even before Manouvrier directed the attention of anthropologists to the types of stature. When one individual is very tall and another is very short, the consequence of this fact alone is that the taller of the two has much longer limbs as compared with the shorter. This is because, according to the general laws of mechanics, the bust grows less than the limbs and is subject to less variation.

But notwithstanding this general fact, other conditions intervene to determine the comparative relations between the two portions of the stature. Indeed, Manouvrier exhibits, within his own school, specimens of equal stature but of different types; and furthermore, he notes that the inhabitants of Polynesia are of tall stature and have a long bust, while negroes, who are also of tall stature, have a short bust.

Types of Stature According to Race.—Among the characteristics of racial types, present-day anthropology has included the reciprocal proportions between the two statures. This means that the medium type in the different races is not always contained within the same limits of fluctuation in regard to stature: but some races are brachyscelous, others are macroscelous, and still again others are mesatiscelous. The most brachyscelous race is the Mongolian, prevalent in the population of China; the most macroscelous is the Australian type that once peopled Tasmania. Other races, as for example the negroid, while in a measure macroscelous, approach nearer to the mesatiscelous type, characteristic of the population of Europe. Let us examine the psycho-ethnic characters of these various peoples. The Chinese are the founders of the most ancient of all oriental civilisations, and have established themselves in a vast empire, solid and stable in its proportions, as well as in the level of its civilisation. It would seem as though the Chinese people, having accomplished the enormous effort of raising themselves to a determined civic level, were no longer capable of advancement. Individually, they have a singularly developed spirit of discipline, and are the most enduring and faithful workers; it is well known that in America the Chinese Mongolian does not fear the competition of labourers of any other race, because no others can compete with him in parsimony, in simple living, and in unremitting toil.

The Tasmanians constituted a people that was considered as having the lowest grade of civilisation among all the races on earth. Even English domination failed to adapt them to a more advanced environment, and their race was consequently scattered and destroyed.

Accordingly, we find associated with extreme macroscelia (Tasmanians) an incapacity for civic evolution; and with the corresponding extreme of brachyscelia an insuperable limitation to civic progress. Consequently, the triumph of man upon earth cannot bear a direct relation to the volume of the bust, or in other words, we cannot assume that the man most favourably endowed on the physiological side is the one who has the largest proportion of viscera. As a matter of fact, the conquering race, the race which has set no limit to the territory of its empire nor to the progress of its civilisation, is composed of white men, whose type of stature is mesatiscelous, that is to say, representative of harmony between its parts. This conception will serve us in establishing a fundamental principle in morphological biology: namely, that perfectibility revolves around a centre, which represents a perfect equilibrium between the various parts constituting an organism. Hence, in order to determine the deviations of the individual type, we must always start from those central data, which represent, as the case may be, normality or perfection.

Even among the populations of Europe, and within the Italian people themselves, fluctuations occur in the degree of mesatiscelia, approaching to a greater or less degree the eccentric forms of brachyscelia or macroscelia; and such fluctuations are an attribute of race.

We should draw a distinction between a people and a race. The term race refers exclusively to a biological classification, and corresponds to the zoological species. On the other hand, we mean by a people a group of human individuals bound together by political ties. Peoples are always made up of a more or less profound intermixture of races. It is well known that one of the most interesting and difficult problems of ethnology is that of tracing out the original types of races in peoples that represent an intermixture centuries old. Without entering too deeply into this question, which lies outside of our present purpose, it will suffice to point out that in the people of Italy it is possible to trace types of races differing from one another, yet so closely related as to render them apparently so similar that they might almost be regarded as a single race.

Now, in an anthropological study of mine on the young women of Latium, I succeeded in tracing, within the confines of that region, different racial types that show corresponding differences in degrees of mesatiscelia. Thus, for example, in Castelli Romani there exists in an almost pure state a dark-haired race, short of stature, slender, elegantly modelled in figure and in profile, and showing within the limits of mesatiscelia a brachyscelous tendency, in contrast with another race, tall, fair, massive, of coarse build, which within the limits of mesatiscelia shows a macroscelous tendency, and which is found in almost pure groups around the locality of Orte, that is, on the boundaries of Umbria. It is interesting to note the importance of researches in ethnological anthropology conducted in small centres of habitation. If it is still possible to trace out groups even approaching racial purity, they will be found only in localities offering little facility to emigration and to the consequent intermixture of races. The fact that we still find in Castelli Romani types so nearly pure, is due to the isolation of this region, which up to yesterday was still in such primitive and rare communication with the capital as to permit of the survival of brigandage. On the contrary, in localities that have attained a higher civic advancement, and in which the inhabitants are placed in favourable economic and intellectual conditions, the facilities of travel and emigration will very soon effect an alteration in the anthropological characters of the race. Hence it would be impossible, in a cosmopolitan city like Rome, to accomplish any useful studies of the sort that I accomplished in the district of Latium, and which led me to conclude that in the small and slender race of Castelli Romani we may trace the descendants of the ancient conquerors of the world: descendants that belong to one variety of the great Mediterranean race, to whom we owe the historic civilisations of Egypt, Greece and Rome.

It would seem that this race, disembarking on the coast of Latium, must have driven back, among the Apennines, the other race, blond and massive, whose pure-blooded descendants are still found in numerical prevalence at Orte, an ancient mediæval town and a natural fortress from the remotest times, through its fortunate situation on the crown of a rocky height, that easily isolates it from the surrounding country (see the ancient history of the town of Orte).

Accordingly, within the limits of mesatiscelia, it appears that the race which in early times won the victory was the more brachyscelous, i.e., the one which had the larger bust, and consequently the larger brain and vital organs. In other words, within the limits of normality, brachyscelia is a physiologically favourable condition.

Variations of Type of Stature According to Social Conditions.—Independently of race, and from such a radically different point of view as that of the social condition, or adaptation to environment, we may still distinguish brachyscelous and macroscelous types. Brachysceles may readily be met with among the labouring classes, habituated