Excerpt from Race Sentiment as a Factor in History: A Lecture Delivered Before the University of London on February 22, 1915 No branches of historical inquiry have suffered more from fanciful speculation than those which relate to the origin and attributes of the races of mankind. The differentiation of these races began in prehistoric darkness, and the more obscure a subject is, so much the more fascinating. Hypotheses are tempting, because though it may be impossible to verify them, it is, in the paucity of data, almost equally impossible to refute them. Many tests have been suggested for determining the affinities of racial groups, but none has proved adequate. Language cannot be trusted, because we know of instances in which peoples have lost their original tongue and adopted another. Bodily characters have been tried, but it is often doubtful to what race the skulls found in ancient sepulchres belong, and some craniologists admit that the shape of the skull is not constant. One of these has lately gone so far as to declare that cephalic measurements of children born to Italian immigrants dwelling in New York indicate a shape different from that of the parental heads. Some writers have sought to represent certain political and social institutions as characteristic of certain linguistic families of mankind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.