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 classify these persistent modifications after the
manner of naturalists, the first circumstance 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 "Skrälings" 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
Agassiz, 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 assumed 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, Norsemen, 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.
To sum up our knowledge of the ethnological past of man: so far as the
light is bright, it shows him substantially as he is now; and, when it
grows dim, it permits us to see no sign that he was other than he is
now.
It is a general belief that men of different stocks differ as much
physiologically as they do morphologically; but it is very hard
to prove, in any particular case, how much of a supposed national
characteristic is due to inherent physiological peculiarities, and
how much to the influence of circumstances. There is much evidence to
show, however, that some stocks enjoy a partial or complete immunity
from diseases which destroy, or decimate, others. Thus there seems
good ground for the belief that Negroes are remarkably exempt from
yellow fever; and that, among Europeans, the melanochrous people are
less obnoxious to its ravages than the xanthochrous. But many writers,
not content with physiological differences of this kind, undertake to
prove the existence of others of far greater moment; and, indeed, to
show that certain stocks of mankind exhibit, more or less distinctly,
the physiological characters of true species. Unions between these
stocks, and still more between the half-breeds arising from their
mixture, are affirmed to be either infertile, or less fertile than
those which take place between males and females of either stock under
the same circumstances. Some go so far as to assert that no mixed
breeds of mankind can maintain themselves without the assistance of
one or other of the parent stocks, and that, consequently, they must
inevitably be obliterated in the long run.
Here, again, it is exceedingly difficult to obtain trustworthy
evidence, and to free the effects of the pure physiological experiment
from adventitious influences. The only trial which, by a strange
chance, was kept clear of all such influences--the only instance in
which two distinct stocks of mankind were crossed, and their progeny
intermarried without any admixture from without--is the famous case
of the Pitcairn Islanders, who were the progeny of Bligh's English
sailors by Tahitian women. The results of this experiment, as
everybody knows, are dead against those who maintain the doctrine of
human hybridity, seeing that the Pitcairn Islanders, even though they
necessarily contracted consanguineous marriages, throve and multiplied
exceedingly.
But those who are disposed to believe in this doctrine should study
the evidence brought forward in its support by M. Broca, its latest
and ablest advocate, and compare this evidence with that which the
botanists, as represented by a Gaertner, or by a Darwin, think it
indispensable to obtain before they will admit the infertility of
crosses between two allied kinds of plants. They will then, I think,
be satisfied that the doctrine in question rests upon a very unsafe
foundation; that the facts adduced in its support are capable of many
other interpretations; and, indeed, that from the very nature of
the case, demonstrative evidence one way or the other is almost
unattainable. _A priori_, I should be disposed to expect a certain
amount of infertility between some of the extreme modifications of
mankind; and still more between the offsprings of their intermixture.
_A posteriori_, I cannot discover any satisfactory proof that such
infertility exists.
From the facts of ethnology I now turn to the theories and
speculations of ethnologists, which have been devised to explain
these facts, and to furnish satisfactory answers to the inquiry--what
conditions have determined the existence of the persistent
modifications of mankind, and have caused their distribution to be
what it is?
These speculations may be grouped under three heads: firstly, the
Monogenist hypotheses; secondly, those of the Polygenists; and
thirdly, that which would result from a simple application of
Darwinian principles to mankind.
According to the Monogenists, all mankind have sprung from a single
pair, whose multitudinous progeny spread themselves over the world,
such as it now is, and became modified into the forms we meet with in
the various regions of the earth, by the effect of the climatal and
other conditions to which they were subjected.
The advocates of this hypothesis are divisible into several schools.
There are those who represent the most numerous, respectable,
and would-be orthodox of the public, and are what may be called
"Adamites," pure and simple. They believe that Adam was made out of
earth somewhere in Asia, about six thousand years ago; that Eve was
modelled from one of his ribs; and that the progeny of these two
having been reduced to the eight persons who were landed on the summit
of Mount Ararat after an universal deluge, all the nations of the
earth have proceeded from these last, have migrated to their present
localities, and have become converted into Negroes, Australians,
Mongolians, &c., within that time. Five-sixths of the public are
taught this Adamitic Monogenism, as if it were an established truth,
and believe it. I do not; and I am not acquainted with any man of
science, or duly instructed person, who does.
A second school of monogenists, not worthy of much attention, attempts
to hold a place midway between the Adamites and a third division, who
take up a purely scientific position, and require to be dealt with
accordingly. This third division, in fact, numbers in its ranks
Linnaeus, Buffon, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Prichard, and many distinguished
living ethnologists.
These "Rational Monogenists," or, at any rate, the more modern among
them, hold, firstly, that the present condition of the earth has
existed for untold ages; secondly, that, at a remote period, beyond
the ken of Archbishop Usher, man was created, somewhere between the
Caucasus and the Hindoo Koosh; thirdly, that he might have migrated
thence to all parts of the inhabited world, seeing that none of them
are unattainable from some other inhabited part, by men provided with
only such means of transport as savages are known to possess and
must have invented; fourthly, that the operation of the existing
diversities of climate and other conditions upon people so migrating,
is sufficient to account for all the diversities of mankind.
Of the truth of the first of these propositions no competent judge now
entertains any doubt. The second is more open to discussion, for in
these latter days many question the special creation of man: and even
if his special creation be granted, there is not a shadow of a reason
why he should have been created in Asia rather than anywhere else.
Of all the odd myths that have arisen in the scientific world, the
"Caucasian mystery," invented quite innocently by Blumenbach, is the
oddest. A Georgian woman's skull was the handsomest in his collection.
Hence it became his model exemplar of human skulls, from which all
others might be regarded as deviations; and out of this, by some
strange intellectual hocus-pocus, grew up the notion that the
Caucasian man is the prototypic "Adamic" man, and his country the
primitive centre of our kind. Perhaps the most curious thing of all
is, that the said Georgian skull, after all, is not a skull of average
form, but distinctly belongs to the brachycephalic group.
With the third proposition I am quite disposed to agree, though
it must be recollected that it is one thing to allow that a given
migration is possible, and another to admit there is good reason to
believe it has really taken place.
But I can find no sufficient ground for accepting the fourth
proposition; and I doubt if it would ever have obtained its general
currency except for the circumstance that fair Europeans are very
readily tanned and embrowned by the sun. But I am not aware that there
is a particle of proof that the cutaneous change thus effected can
become hereditary, any more than that the enlarged livers, which
plague our countrymen in India, can be transmitted;--while there is
very strong evidence to the contrary. Not only, in fact, are there
such cases as those of the English families in Barbadoes, who have
remained for six generations unaltered in complexion, but which are
open to the objection that they may have received infusions of
fresh European blood; but there is the broad fact, that not a single
indigenous Negro exists either in the great alluvial plains of
tropical South America, or in the exposed islands of the Polynesian
Archipelago, or among the populations of equatorial Borneo or Sumatra.
No satisfactory explanation of these obvious difficulties has been
offered by the advocates of the direct influence of conditions. And as
for the more important modifications observed in the structure of the
brain, and in the form of the skull, no one has ever pretended to show
in what way they can be effected directly by climate.
It is here, in fact, that the strength of the Polygenists, or those
who maintain that men primitively arose, not from one, but from many
stocks, lies. Show us, they say to the Monogenists, a single case in
which the characters of a human stock have been essentially modified
without its being demonstrable, or, at least, highly probable, that
there has been intermixture of blood with some foreign stock. Bring
forward any instance in which a part of the world, formerly inhabited
by one stock, is now the dwelling-place of another, and we will prove
the change to be the result of migration, or of intermixture, and not
of modification of character by climatic influences. Finally, prove
to us that the evidence in favour of the specific distinctness of many
animals, admitted to be distinct species by all zoologists, is a whit
better than that upon which we maintain the specific distinctness of
men.
If presenting unanswerable objections to your adversary were the same
thing as proving your own case, the Polygenists would be in a fair way
towards victory; but, unfortunately, as I have already observed, they
have as yet completely failed to adduce satisfactory positive proof
of the specific diversity of mankind. Like the Monogenists, the
Polygenists are of several sects; some imagine that their assumed
species of mankind were created where we find them--the African in
Africa, and the Australian in Australia, along with the other animals
of their distributional province; others conceive that each species of
man has resulted from the modification of some antecedent species of
ape--the American from the broad-nosed Simians of the New World, the
African from the Troglodytic stock, the Mongolian from the Orangs.
The first hypothesis is hardly likely to win much favour. The whole
tendency of modern science is to thrust the origination of things
further and further into the background; and the chief philosophical
objection to Adam being, not his oneness, but the hypothesis of his
special creation; the multiplication of that objection tenfold is,
whatever it may look, an increase, instead of a diminution, of the
difficulties of the case. And, as to the second alternative, it may
safely be affirmed that, even if the differences between men are
specific, they are so small, that the assumption of more than one
primitive stock for all is altogether superfluous. Surely no one can
now be found to assert that any two stocks of mankind differ as much
as a chimpanzee and an orang do; still less that they are as unlike as
either of these is to any New World Simian!
Lastly, the granting of the Polygenist premises does not, in the
slightest degree, necessitate the Polygenist conclusion. Admit that
Negroes and Australians, Negritos and Mongols are distinct species,
or distinct genera, if you will, and you may yet, with perfect
consistency, be the strictest of Monogenists, and even believe in Adam
and Eve as the primaeval parents of all mankind.
It is to Mr. Darwin we owe this discovery: it is he who, coming
forward in the guise of an eclectic philosopher, presents his doctrine
as the key to ethnology, and as reconciling and combining all that is
good in the Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools.
It is true that Mr. Darwin has not, in so many words, applied his
views to ethnology; but even he who "runs and reads" the "Origin of
Species" can hardly fail to do so; and, furthermore, Mr. Wallace and
M. Pouchet have recently treated of ethnological questions from this
point of view. Let me, in conclusion, add my own contribution to the
same store.
I assume Man to have arisen in the manner which I have discussed
elsewhere, and probably, though by no means necessarily, in one
locality. Whether he arose singly, or a number of examples appeared
contemporaneously, is also an open question for the believer in the
production of species by the gradual modification of pre-existing
ones. At what epoch of the world's history this took place, again, we
have no evidence whatever. It may have been in the older tertiary,
or earlier, but what is most important to remember is, that the
discoveries of late years have proved that man inhabited Western
Europe, at any rate, before the occurrence of those great physical
changes which have given Europe its present aspect. And as the same
evidence shows that man was the contemporary of animals which are now
extinct, it is not too much to assume that his existence dates back
at least as far as that of our present Fauna and Flora, or before the
epoch of the drift.
But if this be true, it is somewhat startling to reflect upon the
prodigious changes which have taken place in the physical geography of
this planet since man has been an occupant of it.