Les Types humains

Abstract

THE study of the diversities of mankind is passing through a transition time in which each worker probably sees only a part of the change that is going on and can but bear honest witness to what he sees. Measurements of populations leading to calculations of means and standard deviations and complicated by the creation of various coefficients have proved disappointing and, at times, have led to obviously incorrect results regarding relationships, besides obscuring the biological fact that persons diverse in many ways appear in a population generation after generation through direct inheritance. Descriptions, on the other hand, by means of reference to abstract types, sometimes the creation of statisticians, rather than the results of biological observation, have also proved themselves to be misleading. Yet the diversities noted by Retzius, Blumenbach and others who have followed them obviously have meaning—long heads of various kinds, short heads also of various types, with facial diversities and so on in each case remain important—and even if such characters as skin colour have a different kind of biological history, they must obviously enter into descriptive schemes.

Les Types humains

Par Eugene Schreider. Première Partie: Les Types somatiques; raciaux, morphologiques; constitutionnels. Pp. 104 + 8 plates. 20 francs. Deuxième Partie: Les Types psychologiques; tempéraments; caractères; types d'orientation générale de l'esprit; types psychanalytiques; types réflexologiques; types psychosociologiques. Pp. 79. 18 francs. Troisième Partie: Les Types somatopsychiques; variétés neurovégétatives; constitutions somatopsychiques; biotypes et variétés endocrinologiques; types criminels. Pp. 105 + 5 plates. 20 francs. (Actualités scientifiques et industrielles, 495, 496 and 497: Biologie du travail et biotypologie, 3, 4 and 5.) (Paris: Hermann et Cie., 1937.)