Death came in Manhattan last fortnight to Columbia's Professor Franz Boas, who more than 30 years ago scientifically demolished "this Nordic nonsense" in The Mind of Primitive Man, a book which has since been called the Magna Charta of self-respect for the so-called lower races.
¶For 59 years he measured, compared,' talked facts about humanity, trained most of the outstanding U.S. anthropologists of today.*
Boas wrote, in a letter to TIME in 1936: "The assumption of the biological homogeneity of any race is a fiction. Every race contains many family strain? which are biologically distinct....