What, another book about race? Are the shelves not already
groaning under the weight of innumerable volumes on this
unhappy subject? Has the time not come to call a halt, and to
eradicate the whole question from the fields of public thought
and action?

Yes, there is an almost boundless literature on the subject
of race. Some of the books are detailed studies of particular
subjects, others are attempts at a comprehensive survey of the
major realities. Nevertheless, strange as it may seem, there still
remains much to be said. Many writers recognize the funda-
mental distinction between race and culture, and yet there is a
striking dearth of explicit interpretations of this distinction in
language easily comprehensible to the layman. This lack the
present volume undertakes directly to supply.

Moreover, there is an understandable reluctance of many
writers to rush in where academic angels fear to tread. The
subject is so complicated, so extensive, and so involved with
the minutiae of several branches of learning that they feel only
an intellectual superman would be really competent to deal with
all phases of it with serene confidence. As a matter of fact,
however, this is one of the numerous cases where too much
erudition may prove a handicap in grasping the fundamentals
which may be clear enough if they are not allowed to be obscured
by the limitless mass of technical details. Yet it is in these
fundamentals that the ordinary citizen of the world is primarily
and directly interested, and it is these fundamentals which this
book undertakes to set forth.

Furthermore, there is a tendency in much of the existing
literature to miss the truth because of a too highly developed

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