Critiques and Addresses Part 10

The skulls of these people are always long and narrow, with a smaller development of the frontal sinuses than usually corresponds with such largely developed brow ridges. An Australian skull of a round form, or one the transverse diameter of which exceeds eight-tenths of its length, has never been seen. These people, in a word, are eminently "dolichocephalic," or long-headed; but, with this one limitation, their crania present considerable variations, some being comparatively high and arched, while others are more remarkably depressed than almost any other human skulls.

The female pelvis differs comparatively little from the European; but in the pelves of male Australians which I have examined, the antero-posterior and transverse diameters approach equality more nearly than is the case in Europeans.

No Australian tribe has ever been known to cultivate the ground, to use metals, pottery, or any kind of textile fabric. They rarely construct huts. Their means of navigation are limited to rafts or canoes, made of sheets of bark. Clothing, except skin cloaks for protection from cold, is a superfluity with which they dispense; and though they have some singular weapons, almost peculiar to themselves, they are wholly unacquainted with bows and arrows.

It is but a step, as it were, across Ba.s.s's Straits to Tasmania.

Neither climate nor the characteristic forms of vegetable or animal life change largely on the south side of the Straits, but the early voyagers found Man singularly different from him on the north side.

The skin of the Tasmanian was dark, though he lived between parallels of lat.i.tude corresponding with those of middle Europe in our own hemisphere; his jaws projected, his head was long and narrow; his civilization was about on a footing with that of the Australian, if not lower, for I cannot discover that the Tasmanian understood the use of the throwing-stick. But he differed from the Australian in his woolly, negro-like hair, whence the name of NEGRITO, which has been applied to him and his congeners.

Such Negritos--differing more or less from the Tasmanian, but agreeing with him in dark skin and woolly hair--occupy New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, the Louisiade Archipelago; and stretching to the Papuan Islands, and for a doubtful extent beyond them to the north and west, form a sort of belt, or zone, of Negrito population, interposed between the Australians on the west and the inhabitants of the great majority of the Pacific islands on the east.

The cranial characters of the Negritos vary considerably more than those of their skin and hair, the most notable circ.u.mstance being the strong Australian aspect which distinguishes many Negrito skulls, while others tend rather towards forms common in the Polynesian islands.

In civilization, New Caledonia exhibits an advance upon Tasmania, and, farther north, there is a still greater improvement. But the bows and arrows, the perched houses, the outrigger canoes, the habits of betel-chewing and of kawa-drinking, which abound more or less among the northern Negritos, are probably to be regarded not as the products of an indigenous civilization, but merely as indications of the extent to which foreign influences have modified the primitive social state of these people.

From Tasmania or New Caledonia, to New Zealand or Tongataboo, is again but a brief voyage; but it brings about a still more notable change in the aspect of the indigenous population than that effected by the pa.s.sage of Ba.s.s's Straits. Instead of being chocolate-coloured people, the Maories and Tongans are light brown; instead of woolly, they have straight, or wavy, black hair. And if from New Zealand, we travel some 5,000 miles east to Easter Island; and from Easter Island, for as great a distance north-west, to the Sandwich Islands; and thence 7,000 miles, westward and southward, to Sumatra; and even across the Indian Ocean, into the interior of Madagascar, we shall everywhere meet with people whose hair is straight or wavy, and whose skins exhibit various shades of brown. These are the Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians, whom Latham has grouped together under the common t.i.tle of AMPHINESIANS.

The cranial characters of these people, as of the Negritos, are less constant than those of their skin and hair. The Maori has a long skull; the Sandwich Islander a broad skull. Some, like these, have strong brow ridges; others, like the Dayaks and many Polynesians, have hardly any nasal indentation.

It is only in the westernmost parts of their area that the Amphinesian nations know anything about bows and arrows as weapons, or are acquainted with the use of metals or with pottery. Everywhere they cultivate the ground, construct houses, and skilfully build and manage outrigger, or double, canoes; while, almost everywhere, they use some kind of fabric for clothing.

Between Easter Island, or the Sandwich Islands, and any part of the American coast is a much wider interval than that between Tasmania and New Zealand, but the ethnological interval between the American and the Polynesian is less than that between either of the previously named stocks.

The typical AMERICAN has straight black hair and dark eyes, his skin exhibiting various shades of reddish or yellowish brown, sometimes inclining to olive. The face is broad and scantily bearded; the skull wide and high. Such people extend from Patagonia to Mexico, and much farther north along the west coast. In the main a race of hunters, they had nevertheless, at the time of the discovery of the Americas, attained a remarkable degree of civilization in some localities. They had domesticated ruminants, and not only practised agriculture, but had learned the value of irrigation. They manufactured textile fabrics, were masters of the potter's art, and knew how to erect ma.s.sive buildings of stone. They understood the working of the precious, though not of the useful, metals; and had even attained to a rude kind of hieroglyphic, or picture, writing.

The Americans not only employ the bow and arrow, but, like some Amphinesians, the blow-pipe, as offensive weapons: but I am not aware that the outrigger canoe has ever been observed among them.

I have reason to suspect that some of the Fuegian tribes differ cranially from the typical Americans; and the Northern and Eastern American tribes have longer skulls than their Southern compatriots.

But the ESQUIMAUX, who roam on the desolate and ice-bound coasts of Arctic America, certainly present us with a new stock. The Esquimaux (among whom the Greenlanders are included), in fact, though they share the straight black hair of the proper Americans, are a duller complexioned, shorter, and more squat people, and they have still more prominent cheek-bones. But the circ.u.mstance which most completely separates them from the typical Americans, is the form of their skulls, which instead of being broad, high, and truncated behind, are eminently long, usually low, and prolonged backwards.

These Hyperborean people clothe themselves in skins, know nothing of pottery, and hardly anything of metals. Dependent for existence upon the produce of the chase, the seal and the whale are to them what the cocoa-nut tree and the plantain are to the savages of more genial climates. Not only are those animals meat and raiment, but they are canoes, sledges, weapons, tools, windows, and fire; while they support the dog, who is the indispensable ally and beast of burden of the Esquimaux.

It is admitted that the Tchuktchi, on the eastern side of Behring's Straits, are, in all essential respects, Esquimaux; and I do not know that there is any satisfactory evidence to show that the Tunguses and Samoiedes do not essentially share the physical characters of the same people. Southward, there are indications of Esquimaux characters among the j.a.panese, and it is possible that their influence may be traced yet further.

However this may be, Eastern Asia, from Mantchouria to Siam, Thibet, and Northern Hindostan, is continuously inhabited by men, usually of short stature, with skins varying in colour from yellow to olive; with broad cheek-bones and faces that, owing to the insignificance of the nose, are exceedingly flat; and with small, obliquely-set, black eyes and straight black hair, which sometimes attains a very great length upon the scalp, but is always scanty upon the face and body. The skull is never much elongated, and is, generally, remarkably broad and rounded, with hardly any nasal depression, and but slight, if any, projection of the jaws.

Many of these people, for whom the old name of MONGOLIANS may be retained, are nomades; others, as the Chinese, have attained a remarkable and apparently indigenous civilization, only surpa.s.sed by that of Europe.

At the north-western extremity of Europe the Lapps repeat the characters of the Eastern Asiatics. Between these extreme points, the Mongolian stock is not continuous, but is represented by a chain of more or less isolated tribes, who pa.s.s under the name of Calmucks and Tartars, and form Mongolian islands, as it were, in the midst of an ocean of other people.

The waves of this ocean are the nations for whom, in order to avoid the endless confusion produced by our present half-physical, half-philological cla.s.sification, I shall use a new name--XANTHOCHROI--indicating that they are "yellow" haired and "pale"

in complexion. The Chinese historians of the Han dynasty, writing in the third century before our era, describe, with much minuteness, certain numerous and powerful barbarians with "yellow hair, green eyes, and prominent noses," who, the black-haired, skew-eyed, and flat-nosed annalists remark in pa.s.sing, are "just like the apes from whom they are descended." These people held, in force, the upper waters of the Yenisei, and thence under various names stretched southward to Thibet and Kashgar. Fair-haired and blue-eyed northern enemies were no less known to the ancient Hindoos, to the Persians, and to the Egyptians, on the south of the great central Asiatic area; while the testimony of all European antiquity is to the effect that, before and since the period in question, there lay beyond the Danube, the Rhine, and the Seine, a vast and dangerous yellow or red haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed population. Whether the disturbers of the marches of the Roman Empire were called Gauls or Germans, Goths, Alans, or Scythians, one thing seems certain, that until the invasion of the Huns, they were tall, fair, blue-eyed men.

If any one should think fit to a.s.sume that in the year 100 B.C., there was one continuous Xanthochroic population from the Rhine to the Yenisei, and from the Ural mountains to the Hindoo Koosh, I know not that any evidence exists by which that position could be upset, while the existing state of things is rather in its favour than otherwise.

For the Scandinavians, wholly, the Germans to a great extent, the Slavonian and the Finnish tribes, some of the inhabitants of Greece, many Turks, some Kirghis, and some Mantchous, the Ossetes in the Caucasus, the Siahposh, the Rohillas, are at the present day fair, yellow or red haired, and blue-eyed; and the interpolation of tribes of Mongolian hair and complexion, as far west as the Caspian Steppes and the Crimea, might justly be accounted for by those subsequent westward irruptions of the Mongolian stock, of which history furnishes abundant testimony.

The furthermost limit of the Xanthochroi north-westward is Iceland and the British Isles; south-westward, they are traceable at intervals through the Berber country, and end in the Canary Islands.

The cranial characters of the Xanthochroi are not, at present, strictly definable. The Scandinavians are certainly long-headed; but many Germans, the Swiss so far as they are Germanized, the Slavonians, the Fins, and the Turks, are short-headed. What were the cranial characters of the ancient "U-suns" and "Ting-lings" of the valley of the Yenisei is unknown.

West of the area occupied by the chief ma.s.s of the Xanthochroi, and north of the Sahara, is a broad belt of land, shaped like a =Y=.

Between the forks of the =Y= lies the Mediterranean; the stem of it is Arabia. The stem is bathed by the Indian Ocean, the western ends of the forks by the Atlantic. The people inhabiting the area thus roughly sketched have, like the Xanthochroi, prominent noses, pale skins and wavy hair, with abundant beards; but, unlike them, the hair is black or dark, and the eyes usually so. They may thence be called the MELANOCHROI. Such people are found in the British Islands, in Western and Southern Gaul, in Spain, in Italy south of the Po, in parts of Greece, in Syria and Arabia, stretching as far northward and eastward as the Caucasus and Persia. They are the chief inhabitants of Africa north of the Sahara, and, like the Xanthochroi, they end in the Canary Islands. They are known as Kelts, Iberians, Etruscans, Romans, Pelasgians, Berbers, Semites. The majority of them are long-headed, and of smaller stature than the Xanthochroi.

It is needless to remark upon the civilization of these two great stocks. With them has originated everything that is highest in science, in art, in law, in politics, and in mechanical inventions.

In their hands, at the present moment, lies the order of the social world, and to them its progress is committed.

South of the Atlas, and of the Great Desert, Middle Africa exhibits a new type of humanity in the NEGRO, with his dark skin, woolly hair, projecting jaws, and thick lips. As a rule, the skull of the Negro is remarkably long; it rarely approaches the broad type, and never exhibits the roundness of the Mongolian. A cultivator of the ground, and dwelling in villages; a maker of pottery, and a worker in the useful as well as the ornamental metals; employing the bow and arrow as well as the spear, the typical negro stands high in point of civilization above the Australian.

Resembling the Negroes in cranial characters, the BUSHMEN of South Africa differ from them in their yellowish brown skins, their tufted hair, their remarkably small stature, and their tendency to fatty and other integumentary outgrowths; nor is the wonderful click with which their speech is interspersed to be overlooked in enumerating the physical characteristics of this strange people.

The so-called "Drawidian" populations of Southern Hindostan lead us back, physically as well as geographically, towards the Australians; while the diminutive MINCOPIES of the Andaman Islands lie midway between the Negro and Negrito races, and, as Mr. Busk has pointed out, occasionally present the rare combination of Brachycephaly, or short-headedness, with woolly hair.

In the preceding progress along the outskirts of the habitable world, eleven readily distinguishable stocks, or persistent modifications, of mankind, have been recognized. I have purposely omitted such people as the Abyssinians and the Hindoos, who there is every reason to believe result from the intermixture of distinct stocks. Perhaps I ought, for like reasons, to have ignored the Mincopies. But I do not pretend that my enumeration is complete or, in any sense, perfect. It is enough for my purpose if it be admitted (and I think it cannot be denied) that those which I have mentioned exist, are well marked, and occupy the greater part of the habitable globe.

In attempting to cla.s.sify these persistent modifications after the manner of naturalists, the first circ.u.mstance that attracts one's attention is the broad contrast between the people with straight and wavy hair, and those with crisp, woolly, or tufted hair. Bory de St. Vincent, noting this fundamental distinction, divided mankind accordingly into the two primary groups of _Leiotrichi_ and _Ulotrichi_,--terms which are open to criticism, but which I adopt in the accompanying table, because they have been used. It is better for science to accept a faulty name which has the merit of existence, than to burthen it with a faultless newly invented one.

Under each of these divisions are two columns, one for the Brachycephali, or short heads, and one for the Dolichocephali[1], or long heads. Again, each column is subdivided transversely into four compartments, one for the "leucous," people with fair complexions and yellow or red hair; one for the "leucomelanous," with dark hair and pale skins; one for the "xanthomelanous," with black hair and yellow, brown, or olive skins; and one for the "melanous," with black hair and dark brown or blackish skins.

[Footnote 1: Skulls, the transverse diameter of which is more than eight-tenths the long diameter, are short; those which have the transverse diameter less than eight-tenths the longitudinal, are long.]

LEIOTRICHI. ULOTRICHI.

______________________________ ____________________________ / / Dolichocephali. Brachycephali. Dolichocephali. Brachycephali.

Leucous.

.... Xanthochroi ....

Leucomelanous.

.... Melanochroi ....

Xanthomelanous.

_Esquimaux_. Mongolians. _Bushmen_.

_Amphinesians_.

_Americans_.

Melanous.

_Australians_. Negroes. _Mincopies_(?) _Negritos_

NOTE: _The names of the stocks known only since the fifteenth century are put into italics. If the "Skralings" of the Norse discoverers of America were Esquimaux, Europeans became acquainted with the latter six or seven centuries earlier_.

It is curious to observe that almost all the woolly-headed people are also long-headed; while among the straight-haired nations broad heads preponderate, and only two stocks, the Esquimaux and the Australians, are exclusively long-headed.

One of the acutest and most original of ethnologists, Desmoulins, originated the idea, which has subsequently been fully developed by Aga.s.siz, that the distribution of the persistent modifications of man is governed by the same laws as that of other animals, and that both fall into the same great distributional provinces. Thus, Australia; America, south of Mexico; the Arctic regions; Europe, Syria, Arabia, and North Africa, taken together, are each regions eminently characterized by the nature of their animal and vegetable populations, and each, as we have seen, has its peculiar and characteristic form of man. But it may be doubted whether the parallel thus drawn will hold good strictly, and in all cases. The Tasmanian Fauna and Flora are essentially Australian, and the like is true to a less extent of many, if not of all, the Papuan islands; but the Negritos who inhabit these islands are strikingly different from the Australians. Again, the differences between the Mongolians and the Xanthochroi are out of all proportion greater than those between the Faunae and Florae of Central and Eastern Asia. But whatever the difficulties in the way of the detailed application of this comparison of the distribution of men with that of animals, it is well worthy of being borne in mind, and carried as far as it will go.

Apart from all speculation, a very curious fact regarding the distribution of the persistent modifications of mankind becomes apparent on inspecting an Ethnological chart, projected in such a manner that the Pacific Ocean occupies its centre. Such a chart exhibits an Australian area occupied by dark smooth-haired people, separated by an incomplete inner zone of dark woolly-haired Negritos and Negroes, from an outer zone of comparatively pale and smooth-haired men, occupying the Americas, and nearly all Asia and North Africa.

Such is a brief sketch of the characters and distribution of the persistent modifications, or stocks, of mankind at the present day.

If we seek for direct evidence of how long this state of things has lasted, we shall find little enough, and that little far from satisfactory. Of the eleven different stocks enumerated, seven have been known to us for less than 400 years; and of these seven not one possessed a fragment of written history at the time it came into contact with European civilization. The other four--the Negroes, Mongolians, Xanthochroi, and Melanochroi--have always existed in some of the localities in which they are now found, nor do the negroes ever seem to have voluntarily travelled beyond the limits of their present area. But ancient history is in a great measure the record of the mutual encroachments of the other three stocks.

On the whole, however, it is wonderful how little change has been effected by these mutual invasions and intermixtures. As at the present time, so at the dawn of history, the Melanochroi fringed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; the Xanthochroi occupied most of Central and Eastern Europe, and much of Western and Central Asia; while Mongolians held the extreme east of the Old World. So far as history teaches us, the populations of Europe, Asia, and Africa were, twenty centuries ago, just what they are now, in their broad features and general distribution.

The evidence yielded by Archaeology is not very definite, but, so far as it goes, it is to much the same effect. The mound builders of Central America seem to have had the characteristic short and broad head of the modern inhabitants of that continent. The tumuli and tombs of Ancient Scandinavia, of pre-Roman Britain, of Gaul, of Switzerland, reveal two types of skull--a broad and a long--of which, in Scandinavia, the broad seems to have belonged to the older stock, while the reverse was probably the case in Britain, and certainly in Switzerland. It has been a.s.sumed that the broad-skulled people of ancient Scandinavia were Lapps; but there is no proof of the fact, and they may have been, like the broad-skulled Swiss and Germans, Xanthochroi. One of the greatest of ethnological difficulties is to know where the modern Swedes, Nors.e.m.e.n, and Saxons got their long heads, as all their neighbours, Fins, Lapps, Slavonians, and South Germans, are broad-headed. Again, who were the small-handed, long-headed people of the "bronze epoch," and what has become of the infusion of their blood among the Xanthochroi?

At present Palaeontology yields no safe data to the ethnologist. We know absolutely nothing of the ethnological characters of the men of Abbeville and Hoxne; but must be content with the demonstration, in itself of immense value, that Man existed in Western Europe when its physical condition was widely different from what it is now, and when animals existed, which, though they belong to what is, properly speaking, the present order of things, have long been extinct. Beyond the limits of a fraction of Europe, Palaeontology tells us nothing of man or of his works.