John Beddoe was Britain's foremost anthropologist who specialized in the study of race and racial origins. He was one of the foremost practitioners of the art of craniology, or the study of skull shapes in relation to race. This book, compiled from a series of lectures delivered in Edinburgh, provides a sweeping view of European racial history from Russia to Iceland, and from Scandinavia to Sicily. It includes an analysis of the different European sub-races, the "Aryan origin" theory, an overview of European Jewry, and a fascinating conclusion outlining what he saw as the racial future. On racial differences: "There are assuredly diversities of gifts pertaining to diverse breeds of men; and unless we are all reduced to the dull dead level of socialism, and perhaps even in that case, for the sake of relief, we shall continue to stand in need of all these gifts." On Jews: "Jews grow not only in number, living longer and dying less readily than the Gentiles among whom they dwell, but they are gradually attracting to themselves the whole moveable wealth of the earth; and wealth is power, and the world must move or halt as wealth bids it. It would be strange if, in spite of the community of religion and traditions and usages, there were not some moral or intellectual difference connected with the physical one between these two sections of the Hebrews." On classical Greece: "That the Hellenes proper were a race of the type we most of us call the long-headed Aryan, there seems no doubt. Nicollucci found an index of 75.8 in 26 ancient Greeks. The skulls that have come down to us from the classical period are generally long, rather narrow and high; and blond coloration was common and admired among the Greeks, at all events in the early historical period."