Abstract
DR. CROOKSHANK argues with much skill in favour of his view that in the not uncommon occurrence of Mongoloid characters in Western Europeans, of which the extreme example is the so-called Mongoloid imbecile, there is something more than a fortuitous resemblance to the racial Mongol. He adduces a large number of homologies between these abnormal cases and the Mongol races, emphasising in particular the peculiar method of sitting with the legs in the horizontal position familiar in the statues of Buddha, which seems natural to the Mongoloid imbecile, and maintains that they point to the atavistic character of this peculiarity. Mr. H. Peake has argued in favour of the introduction of a Mongoloid strain in Northern Europe in prehistoric times, and it is by no means impossible that some infiltration of Mongol blood may have followed from the racial invasions of Eastern Europe. Dr. Crookshank, however, presses his theory further and seeks to connect the Mongols with the orang, setting them against the group in which he places other races-with dementia praecox as the corresponding form of mental disease-and the chimpanzee and gorilla. It is this part of his theory which has been most strongly criticised, for, as he shows, it involved the adoption of Klaatsch's theory of two distinct parent types, one for orang and Mongols on one hand, and one for gorilla and negro on the other-a theory which has not found favour among anthropologists generally.
The Mongol in our Midst: a Study of Man and his Three Faces.
Dr.
F. G.
Crookshank
By. Pp. 128 + 29 plates. (London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1924.) 2s. 6d. net.
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The Mongol in our Midst: a Study of Man and his Three Faces. Nature 114, 605 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/114605c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/114605c0