Organometallics

native peoples, their languages, and their ways of life. It was then believed that a severe environment adversely affected native American cultures, that the people themselves constituted an inferior race, and that, in keeping with the idea of progress, education would enable them to evolve gradually toward civilization. The entire 19th century was plagued by the "genetic fallacy," that languages and cultures were transmitted in the "blood stream." In advancing these views argument raged over human originsover monogenism vs. polygenism, over evolution vs. degeneration, over biology vs. culture, over empirical field observation vs. armchair theorizing, and over ethnology applied to public policy. In general, the monogenists advocated evolution, the child of progress. The tendency was to measure and judge Indians by one of these received theories rather than to view them against their natural environment and record the facts of ethnography. How gradual tinkering with the idea of progress produced changes in theories of evolution is the major theme of Bieder's book. The work is structured around the ideas of five ethnologists-Gallatin, Morton, Squire, Schoolcraft, and Morgan-each of a somewhat different field-whom Bieder treats topically with relevant biography. It was Albert Gallatin, a native Swiss and child of the Enlightenment, most often remembered now as an early Secretary of the Treasury, who transplanted the discipline of Old World philology to the comparative study of native American languages. He and Peter Duponceau started a continuing tradition at the American Philosophical Society of American linguistics that moved from collection of vocabularies, proceeded to grammatical analysis, and resulted in classification of languages into families and stocks. Settling in New York City, in 1842 he founded the American Ethnological Society and for years presided over its activities. To Gallatin, ethnology was a humanistic discipline, as it remains today. Samuel G. Morton, physician of Philadelphia, trained at Edinburgh, departed from Gallatin's monogenism toward polygenism and believed in the immutability of races. He collected crania from the entire Western Hemisphere, devised measurements to suit his theories, and developed a technique for ascertaining cranial capacity with mustard seed. He left a legacy of empiricism to physical anthropology, and despite its misrepresentations Crania Americana (1839) marked the way to human biology. Upstate New York claims the three remaining figures as native sons. Of these E G. Squire contributed principally to archeol-