Sent from Aleš Hrdlička
22 Aug 1922
Description:

‘Dear Prof. Pearson:

I wish to express to you and to Prof. Mahalanobis a grateful appreciation for the article by the latter, “On the Need for Standardization in Measurements in the Living.”

As a matter of fact, conditions are even much worse – the old experts in anthropometry such as Manouvrier, Ranke, Schwalbe, Martin, etc., are dead, and their young successors have in many cases more desire to invent and infividualize, than experience or respect for those who were born before them. Moreover, the instrumentarium of anthropometry is also in a bad shape, as many individual instruments are sold or in use the accuracy of which have not been carefully tested.

Such very good critical articles as the present are bound to do some good. But I believe it would be dangerous to call now, or very soon, another International Conference. With most of the old masters gone, who could attend such a conference; and if the younger elements took charge there would be a serious danger, I apprehend, of scrapping much of the old, rather than building on what is sound in the old foundations.

These matters have worried me now for a long time; but it is hard to see a remedy. Individualism is rampant everywhere, and the only hope I see is the eventual survival of the fittest.

What is needed above all in these lines is the development, under new, full confidence inspiring men, of Laboratories or Institutes where anthropometry would be studied, rigidly practised, and then taught. This might lead eventually to the condition that no one who has not had a proper training in such a Laboratory or Institute would obtain a position as either an instructor or worker in this line.

With your many advantages you more than anyone else could, I think, realize this ideal for England; and once realized I think other countries, especially America, would soon follow.

Sincerely yours,

A. Hrdlička

Curator [Smithsonian]

Physical Anthropology’