I
P R E F A C E .
BY GEO. R. GLIDDON.
“ The subject of Ethnology I deem it expedient to postpone. On this I
have collected a mass of new materials, which I hope in time to produce«*
but until they have been submitted to the masterly analysis of my honored
friend, S amuel George Morton, M. D ., Philadelphia, a synopsis from my
hands would be premature.” *
L it t l e did I expect, while penning the above note, that, ere four
years had run their courae, it would fall to the lot of Dr. N ott and
myself to “ close ranks” and partially fill the gap left in American
Ethnology when the death-shot struck down our friend and leader.
To him the “ new materials” were submitted: by him they were
analyzed with his customary acuteness; and from him would the world
have received a series of works superseding the necessity for the
present volume, together with' any public action of my colleague and
myself in that science so indelibly marked by M orton as his own.
The 15th of May, 1851, arrested his hand, and left us, with all who
knew him, to sorrow at his loss: nor, for eleven months, did the
endeavor to raise a literary monument to his memory suggest
itself either to Dr. Nott or to myself.
“ Types of Mankind” owes its origin to the following incidents: —
After a gratifying winter at New Orleans, I visited Mobile in April,
1852; partly to deliver a course of Lectures upon “ Babylon, Nineveh,
and Persepolis,” hut mainly to renew with Dr. Nott those
interchanges of thought which amity had commenced during my
preceding sojourn, in 1848, at one of the most agreeable of cities.
M orton and Ethnology, it -may well he supposed, were exhaustless
topics of conversation. Deploring that no one had stepped forward
to make known the matured views of the father of our cis-Atlantic
school of Anthropology, it occurred to us that we would write one
or more articles, in some Review, based upon the correspondence and
* Hand-book to the Nile; London, Madden, 1849; p. 18, note.
. (ix)