Race Crossing in Jamaica

Abstract

IF length of title, weight of names, and number of printed pages can make a great book, this work should certainly be such. An ‘abstract’ printed at the back of the title tells us that the work is a quantitative study of three groups of agricultural Jamaican adults: blacks, whites, and the hybrids between them. Further, that the variability of each race and sex in respect to each bodily dimension and many bodily organs is discussed. We are also informed that it appears that mental traits which seem to have a genetic basis vary just as morphological traits do. In some sensory tests the blacks are superior to whites; in some intellectual tests the reverse is found. A portion of the hybrids are mentally inferior to the blacks. The studies embraced in the book are “morphological, physiological, psychological, developmental, and eugenical”.

Race Crossing in Jamaica.

C. B. Davenport Morris Steggerda in collaboration with F. G. Benedict, Lawrence H. Snyder, Arnold Gesell, Inez Dunkelberger Steggerda and many Residents of the Colony of Jamaica. (Publication No. 395.) Pp. ix + 516 + 29 plates. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1929.) 7.00 dollars.