THE CONQUEST OF
A CONTINENT
OR
THE EXPANSION OF RACES IN AMERICA
BY
MADISON GRANT
PRESIDENT, NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY
TRUSTEE, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
PRESIDENT, BOONE AND CROCKETT CLUB
COUNCILLOR, AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
AUTHOR, "PASSING OF THE GREAT RACE"
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
PROF. HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK · LONDON
MCMXXXIII
Copyright, 1933, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this bookmay be reproduced in any form withoutthe permission of Charles Scribner's Sons
To
MY BROTHER
DE FOREST GRANT
INTRODUCTION
[Pg vii]The character of a country depends upon the racial character of the menand women who dominate it. I welcome this volume as the first attemptto give an authentic racial history of our country, based on thescientific interpretation of race as distinguished from language andfrom geographic distribution.
The most striking induction arising through research into theprehistory of man is that racial characters and predispositions,governing racial reactions to certain old and new conditions of life,extend far back of the most ancient civilizations. For example,the characteristics which Homer, in the Iliad and the Odyssey,attributed to his heroes and to his imaginary gods and goddesseswere not the product of the civilization which existed in his timein Greece; they were the product of creative evolution long prioreven to the beginnings of Greek culture and government. This creativeprinciple—the most mysterious of the recently discovered phenomenaof evolution, to which I have devoted the researches of nearly halfa century—is that racial preparation for various expressions ofcivilization—art, law, government, etc.—is long antecedent to theseinstitutions.
Ripley missed this point in his superb researches into the racialconstitution of the peoples of Europe. Grant partly based his Passingof the Great Race on Ripley's researches, but did not carry out thepurely[Pg viii] anatomical analysis to its logical end-point, namely, thatmoral, intellectual, and spiritual traits are just as distinctive andcharacteristic of different races as are head-form, hair and eye color,physical stature, and other data of anthropologists.
In the present volume, which I regard as an entirely original andessential contribution to the history of the United States of America,Grant goes much further and in tracing back the racial origins of themajority of our people he lays the foundation for an understandingof the peculiar characteristics of American civilization, which, allagree, is of a very new type, something the world has never before seen.
Grant supports Ripley in his distinction between three great Europeanstocks—Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean. He gives very strong additionalreasons for one of his own earlier inductions,