geographically designating its pre-historic home, has also been called
the Turanian, the Ural-Altaic, the Finno-Ugric, the Mongolic, etc. Its
geographical location is north of the Altai range, and the Caspian and
Black seas, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic ocean. The languages
of all its members are polysyllabic and agglutinative, contrasting as
much with the Sinitic stock on the one hand as with the Aryac on the
other. In physical appearance individuals of reasonably pure descent
present good specimens of the Asian type, the skull brachycephalic,
the face round, the nose flat at the root, the eye small and black,
the hair straight and coarse, the color yellowish. They are divided
into many tribes, most of whom were until recently addicted to a
wandering pastoral life, and though on the lower levels of culture and
without coherent social bonds, they have at times loomed up as the most
powerful and pretentious figures in the history of the world.
Furthest to the east is
_1. The Tungusic Group_,
Which occupies the coast from the northern boundary of China to
Kamschatka, and westward to the Yenissei river. It embraces the Manchus
and the Tungus. The former, a bold hardy people, possessed themselves
of the throne of China early in the seventeenth century, and continue
to rule it by a military despotism, adapted with consummate skill to
the peculiarities of Chinese character. This has led to an extensive
fusion of Sinitic blood among the Manchus, and also an improvement in
their social status. They have become Buddhists, and their language is
losing ground before the Chinese.
The Tungus to the north of them, inhabiting a vast district of forest,
swamp and mountain, east of the Yenissei river, are of ruder life.
They depend for subsistence on the chase and on their large herds
of reindeer. In religion they adhere to the worship of the powers of
nature, and are under the control of their priests or “shamans.” They
present a well marked Asiatic type, a brachycephalic skull (81°), round
face and oblique eyes, the hair coarse and straight, the beard scanty.
In stature they are of medium height, strongly built, and the senses of
sight and hearing unusually keen.
Like most nations dwelling in or near the Arctic zone, the disposition
of the Tungus is decidedly cheerful and affable. He is hospitable to
strangers, and honorable in his dealings. In habits, however, he has
no notion of cleanliness, and the Tatar name applied to him--_tongus_,
hog--expresses what his not over-nice neighbors think of his mode of
life.
The tribes were subjected to the Russian domination about 1650, and
have been gradually improving their condition. A portion of them called
Lamuts reside on the sea of Ochotsk, and have fixed villages with
houses built in the Russian style.[135]
_2. The Mongolic Group_
had their original home in Mongolia, a vast arid country south of the
Altai range, and west of Manchuria. Before the Christian era they had
extended north beyond the mountains and occupied the land around Lake
Baikal, whence they proceeded easterly, and under the name of Kalmucks
have settled quite to the river Volga. Few of them are agriculturists,
it being their preference to wander over the pastures with their
flocks. Their religion is a debased form of Buddhism grafted on their
ancient fetichism. In physical type they are true Asiatics, and are of
a restless, warlike disposition.
In the extended region which they inhabit, stretching over seventy
degrees of longitude, they have had space to multiply until their
numbers once became a menace to all other nations of the Eurasian
continent. Under Genghis Khan, in the beginning of the thirteenth
century, they poured down in countless hordes on the cultivated nations
of Asia and Europe, and in a few years established a monarchy, the
then greatest in the world. About a century later his descendant, the
sanguinary Tamerlane, swept Asia from the Indian Ocean to the Arctic
circle; and at the close of yet another century Baber, of the same
redoubted lineage, founded the empire of the Great Mogul (Mongol) in
India, extending from the Indus to the Ganges. Based, however, on
despotism, barbarism and fanaticism, these gigantic states disappeared
in a few generations, leaving scarcely a trace of their existence
except the ruins of the higher civilizations which they had destroyed.
_3. The Tataric Group._
Derived its name from the Chinese word _ta-ta_, and is incorrectly
written _Tartar_. Another Chinese name applied to them was _Tu-kiu_,
from which is derived our word “Turk.”
The earliest home of the Tatars or Turks was in Turkestan, north of the
Plateau of Pamir and in the immediate vicinity of the Persian Aryans.
Long before the beginning of the Christian era their predatory bands
had repeatedly invaded the territory of the Aryans and the Semites,
and quite down to two centuries ago the states which they had founded
were looked upon with dread by the mightiest potentates of Europe. The
Chinese annals speak of their inroads into that empire more than 200
years before our era.
At the period of the migration of nations which accompanied the
dismemberment and fall of the Roman Empire, the Tatars appeared
frequently in Europe, always as ruthless devastators. Attila, “the
scourge of God,” with his bands of Huns, the Avari, and the Bulgari,
who followed in his wake, the Turcomans and the Cossacks, and finally
the Osmanli Turks whose descendants now govern European and Asiatic
Turkey, and whose Sultan is the political head of the Mohammedan world,
all belong in this group.
It is needless to say that in these rovings they have undergone much
admixture. The modern Turk has more of the blood of the Semite and the
Circassian in his veins than of his Tartar ancestors; but his language
has maintained a singular purity, and the Tartar hunter, the Jakout,
in the delta of the Lena on the frozen ocean, finds no difficulty in
understanding its ordinary expressions. The Jakout speaks indeed the
purest and most ancient form of the idiom, “The Sanscrit of the Tatar,”
as it has been called by Friedrich Müller.
The peculiarity of this language is that it has a law of vocalic
harmony, by which the various suffixes added to the root change the
vowels they contain in accordance with the vowel of the root. It has
not only a pleasing sound, but superior flexibility and an unusual
capacity to express fine shades of meaning. It is, however, losing
ground both in Europe and Asia, as are all the agglutinative languages.
Next to the Turks, the Cossacks and Kirghis Tatars are prominent
members of the stock. They are closely related, being branches of the
same dialectic family. The former wander over the steppes between the
Sea of Aral and the main chain of the Altai. It is not known when they
occupied this region, but it was within historic times, and they drove
from it a people of higher civilization, acquainted with the use of
bronze and brass, and dwellers in cities.[136] The Kirghis themselves
build no houses, but dwell in felt tents called “yourts.” They did not
cultivate the soil, deriving their food from their flocks and herds,
but of late years have begun a careless agriculture. In religion they
profess Mohammedanism, but in reality they cling to their ancient
Shamanistic superstitions.
4. _The Finnic Group_
Has lived for certainly two thousand years or more in Northern Europe.
It is mentioned by Tacitus, and its traditions as well as its dialects
support this antiquity. That it ever extended, as many theorists
pretend, into Central or Southern Europe, may now be dismissed as an
obsolete hypothesis, disproved by craniological studies and a closer
scrutiny of the alleged linguistic resemblances which have been urged.
The probability is that the Finns and Lapps had the same ancestors as
the Samoyeds of Northern Siberia, who once lived on the upper streams
of the Yenissei in the Sajanic mountains and around Lake Baikal. The
Laplanders are said still to retain some reminiscence of the migration,
and the verbal affinities of the Finnic and Samoyedic demonstrate an
early relationship.[137]
The eastern members of the group are the Ugrians in the government of
Tobolsk, some tribes on the Volga, and the Permians on the Kama river
(an affluent of the Volga). The Magyars of Hungary are a branch of the
Ugrians who possessed themselves of the land in the ninth century, and
who still retain their language, not remote from the Finnish.
The present Finnland was first occupied by the Lapps or Laplanders,
who were driven northward and westward by bands continually arriving
from the east. The Finns, who call themselves “Suomi,” which is the
same as the initial syllables of “Samo-yed,” are subdivided into the
Esthonians and Livonians on the Baltic, south of the Gulf of Finland,
the Tavastes, Karelians, and others to the north.
The physical type of the members of the Finnic group has given
rise to much discussion. Many individuals are blondes, with light
hair and eyes, and with dolichocephalic skulls. Such are especially
numerous among the Esthonians, Karelians, and Tavastes. But it must
be remembered that for two or three thousand years these tribes have
been in contact with the blonde and dolichocephalic type of the Aryans,
represented by the ancient Teutonic and Slavonic groups (see Lect. V).
It is not in the least surprising therefore to find the Finnic group
everywhere deeply infused with Aryac blood. Even the remote Lapps are
no exception. Nominally there are 25,000 or more of them. But Prince
Roland Bonaparte says as the result of his recent observations among
them, “Pure Lapps no longer exist;”[138] and when this is true of that
isolated people, how much more is it of the tribes in closer proximity
to the Eurafrican race? We may conclude with Professor Keane that the
genuine traits of the Finnic group are “fundamentally and typically
Mongolic,” _i. e._, Sibiric.[139]
There is no reason to suppose that any of the Sibiric peoples extended
southerly in Asia or Europe much beyond their present boundaries.
It has been a mania with many ethnographers, especially linguistic
ethnographers, to discover “Turanian” peoples and dialects in
numerous parts of southern and central Europe. They would have it
that the Basques, the Etruscans, the Ligurians, the Pelasgians,
were “Turanian;” that the prehistoric inhabitants of Palestine, the
Hittites, and the Shepherd Kings of Egypt, were also of this ilk. They
are like those other ethnographers who find “Mongoloid” indications
everywhere, in America, in Polynesia, even among the Bushmen of South
Africa. As Friedrich Müller says of these writers, “Mongolian” is a
sack into which everything is crammed by them. There is no true science
in catching at superficial resemblances or exalting remote analogies
while fixed distinctions are disregarded.
_5. The Arctic Group._
In northeastern Siberia, close to the Arctic circle, and occupying the
territory between the Pacific and Arctic oceans, dwell a number of
tribes in a condition of barbarism. Their languages are in general form
of the Sibiric type; their physical traits vary, indicating frequent
admixture. In color they are rather dark, and the skull is generally
slightly dolichocephalic.
Of these the Chukchis occupy the extreme northeast of the continent.
Nordenskjold, who saw much of them, considers them the mixed
descendants of various tribes, driven from more hospitable regions to
the south.[140] Some of them have a marked Mongolic aspect, but the
majority differ from that type. They are yellowish-brown in color,
prominent nose, tall in stature, and well built. They are active
hunters and fishermen. The Namollos are a sedentary branch of the
Chukchis, and both are related to the Koraks and Kamschatkans. The
Namollos live along the Arctic coast, near East Cape, while the Koraks
live to the south. “Kora” means “reindeer,” and they are essentially
the reindeer people, that useful animal being their chief wealth.
Close to East Cape, and southward along the coast of Behring sea, are
Eskimo tribes. They have lived there from the first discovery of the
coast, and doubtless long before. Indeed, as far as tradition goes, the
movements of the Eskimos have been from America into Asia, and not the
reverse, until they were driven back by the advancing Chukchis.[141]
The Kamschatkans to the south are of small stature, but strongly
formed. They live upon fish, and are skillful in the use of dogs for
sleds. They number only about 2000 souls, and are disappearing.
The Ghiliaks live near the mouth of the Amoor river and on the Saghalin
islands. They are a mixed people, the cephalic index varying from 74
to 85; some of them have abundant beards, which is very rare among the
pure Asiatics.[142]
The Aleutians, who occupy the long chain of islands reaching from
Kamschatka to Alaska, are of medium height, flat nose, black eyes and
hair, and mesocephalic. They belong to the American, not to the Asian
race.
Most of these peoples speak tongues differing widely among themselves,
but of the agglutinative type. They are in no way related to the
American languages, and are equally remote from the Mongolian.
_6. The Japanese Group._
The Japanese cannot claim purity of descent. Their complexion and
frequent crisp or wavy hair indicate that their Asian origin has been
modified by other blood. They were not the earliest inhabitants of the
archipelago they occupy, but moved into it probably about a thousand
years before the Christian era.[143] The immigrants seem from some
linguistic evidence to have come from Manchuria or Mongolia, and to
have found upon the islands a different people, the Ainos (properly
Ainu) remarkable for their heavy beards and hairy persons. These have
now been driven to the northernmost portion of the archipelago, where
about 1200 of them still reside. It was long thought that the languages
of the Ainos and Japanese have some affinities, but except in loan
words and a general phonetic resemblance, this has now been disproved.
The Ainos seem physically related to the Ghiliaks, and came from the
north and west. They are supposed to have been the first occupants of
the Kurile islands.
Like other mixed peoples, the Japanese vary so much in height, form of
skull, hue and bodily proportion, that it is impracticable to set up
any fixed type for them, further than to say that their general Asiatic
aspect is usually unmistakable to the trained eye.[144] In mental
qualities they are gifted, being intelligent, artistic, brave, kind,
and honorable, fully alive to the benefits of a high civilization,
and able to accept with profit all that the western world has to
offer.[145] They are monogamists, and the position of woman has always
been respected among them. The prevailing religion is the Shintoism
or worship of the powers of nature, but Buddhism, introduced in the
7th century, has also many votaries. At heart, however, they are an
irreligious people, like the Chinese, and are unconcerned about the
ideal and the mystical. Many of their arts, like that of writing,
were at first learned from the Chinese; but they have improved upon
them, and given them other directions, as in the development of their
phonetic from the Chinese syllabic alphabet.
Japanese art has attracted in recent years the admiration of the
European world, and many motives in it have been accepted by our
lovers of decorative effects. It is indeed wonderful in its technical
finish, and its theory of composition has novelties which are worthy of
imitation, but it is devoid of that something which we call the ideal;
and its canon of proportion of the human body has never been developed
to approach the classical models.
There is an extensive literature in the Japanese tongue. Most of it
deals with practical subjects, and even the poetry is usually didactic
in spirit.
The Koreans seem originally to have come from the same stock as the
ancestors of the Japanese. They are of more positive Asiatic type, and
are a mixed people, the ruling class (the Kaoli) having conquered the
peninsula in the second century before our era. They closely resemble
the Loochoo islanders, and doubtless are consanguine with them. Their
industries are similar to those of Japan, which country, indeed,
obtained many of its arts from China by way of the Korean peninsula.
LECTURE VIII.
INSULAR AND LITTORAL PEOPLES.
CONTENTS.--Variability of islanders and coast peoples. Physical
geography of Oceanica. Ethnographic divisions.
I. THE NEGRITIC STOCK. Subdivisions. 1. The Negritic Group.
Members. Former extension. Physical aspect. Culture. 2. The Papuan
Group. Location. Physical traits. Culture and language. 3. The
Melanesian Group. Physical traits. Habits. Languages. Ethnic
affinities of Papuas and Melanesians.
II. THE MALAYIC STOCK. Location. Subdivisions. Affinities with the
Asian Race and original home. 1. The Western or Malayan Group.
Physical traits. Character. Extension. Culture. Presence in
Hindostan. 2. The Eastern or Polynesian Group. Physical traits.
Migrations. Character and culture. Easter Island.
III. THE AUSTRALIC STOCK. Affinities between the Australians and
Dravidians. 1. The Australian Group. Tasmanians and Australians.
Physical traits. Culture. 2. The Dravidian Group. Early extension.
Members. Culture. Languages.
Before proceeding to the ethnography of the American continent, I would
have you take a rapid survey of the inhabitants of that extensive
archipelago whose islands are thickly dotted in the Indian and Pacific
oceans, and ascertain as far as may be the relationship in which they
stand to the population of the adjacent coasts.
_Scheme of Insular and Littoral Peoples._
{ 1. Negrito Group. { Mincopies, Aetas, Schobaengs,
{ Mantras, Semangs, Sakaies.
I. Negritic Stock. { 2. Papuan Group. Papuas, New Guineans.
{ Natives of Feejee Islands, New
{ 3. Melanesian Group. { Caledonia, Loyalty Islands, New
{ Hebrides, etc.
{ Malays, Sumatrese, Javanese,
{ 1. Malayan Group. { Battaks, Dayaks, Macassars,
{ Tagalas, Hovas (of Madagascar).
II. Malayic Stock.
{ 2. Polynesian Group. Polynesians, Micronesians, Maoris.
{ 1. Australian Group. Tasmanians, Australians.
III. Australic
Stock.
{ Dravidas, Tamuls, Telugus,
{ 2. Dravidian Group { Canarese, Malayalas, Todas,
{ Khonds, Mundas, Santals,
{ Kohls, Bhillas.
It was Darwin’s theory that the distant progenitor of man was an
amphibious marine animal, and certainly from earliest times he has
had a predilection for water-ways and the sea-coast. The lines of these
have always directed his wanderings, and it is not surprising therefore
that nowhere do we find the physical types of the race so confusingly
amalgamated as in the insular littoral peoples. Not only is transit
easier in these localities, but on islands especially there is a more
rapid intermingling and a closer interbreeding than is apt to occur
in continental areas. This not only blends types, but it has another
effect. It is well known from observation on the lower animals that
such close unions result in the formation of more plastic organisms,
liable to present wide variations, and to develop into contrasting
characters.[146] This holds good also of mental products. For instance,
you might suppose that the dialects of the same island or the same
small archipelago would offer very slight differences. The reverse is
the case. In the same area the dialects of an island differ far more
than on the mainland. This is a fact well known to linguists, and is
parallel to the physical variations.[147] The ethnographer, therefore,
is prepared to attach less importance to corporeal and linguistic
differences in insular than in continental peoples.
_Physical Geography of Oceanica._--The island world of the Indian and
Pacific Oceans is divided geologically into two regions, Australasia
and Polynesia. The former, as its name denotes, is really a
southeasterly prolongation of the continent of Asia, and was united to
it in late tertiary times. The huge islands of Sumatra, Java and Borneo
are separated from the Malayan and Siamese peninsulas by channels
scarcely a couple of hundred feet deep; and from these a chain of
islands extends uninterruptedly to the semi-continent of Australia.
All these islands are of tertiary formation, and the subsidence which
separated them from the main took place at the close of that geologic
epoch.
The Polynesian islands, on the other hand, are of recent construction.
They are submarine towers of coral, erected on the crests of sunken
mountain ranges rising on the floor of a profoundly deep sea.
Nevertheless the flora and fauna of Polynesia resemble that of
Australasia in its strongly Asiatic character.
The islands of the Indian Ocean present some singular anomalies.
Ceylon, though so close to the Indian peninsula, is not a geological
fragment of it; while Madagascar, though four thousand miles away, was
unquestionably once a part of Southern Hindostan.[148] This, however,
was in remote eocene tertiary times, and long before man appeared.
The hypothesis, therefore, advanced by Hæckel and favored by Peschel
and other ethnographers, that the Indian Ocean was once filled by the
continent “Lemuria,” and that there man appeared on the globe, must be
dismissed so far as man is concerned, as in conflict with more accurate
observations.
Yet one must acknowledge that it has some plausibility from the present
ethnography of the islands and coasts of the Indian Ocean. There is
a general consensus of opinion that the earliest occupants of these
regions were an undersized black race, resembling in many respects the
negrillos of Austafrica. Upon these was superimposed an Asiatic stock
represented by the modern Malays; and the union of these two strains
gave rise to the anomalous tribes which occupy Southern Hindostan,
Australia, and some of the islands.
This historic scheme, which has a great deal in its favor, permits me
to classify the great island-world and its adjacent mainland into three
ethnographic categories as represented on the diagram.
Of these the most ancient is
I. THE NEGRITIC STOCK.
This embraces three subdivisions, (1) the Negritos, (2) the Papuas, (3)
the Melanesians.
_1. The Negrito Group._
The Negritos may be called the western branch of the stock. It is
noteworthy that they are located nearer to Africa, and that they more
distinctly resemble the Negrillo stock of that continent than do the
Papuas. To them belong the natives of the Andaman Islands known as
Mincopies, the Semangs, Mantras, and Sakaies of Malacca, the Aetas of
the Philippine Islands, and the Schobaengs of the Nicobar Isles.[149]
It is highly probable that they inhabited a large part of Southern
Hindostan, perhaps before it was united to the Himalayan highlands (see
p. 88), and some have been reported in Formosa.
They are believed to have been the original possessors of Borneo, Java,
Sumatra and the Celebes Islands, as well as parts of Indo-China; but
except in some mixed tribes, as the Mois of the latter region, their
stock has disappeared from those localities. It is noteworthy that not
a trace of their blood has been found in Asia north of the Hindu Cush
and Himalaya ranges.[150] Some writers have thought that they proceeded
along the eastern islands as far north as the Japanese archipelago, and
would explain some of the present physical traits of its inhabitants by
an ancient infusion of Negritic blood.
In physical aspect they are of small stature, not more than one-fourth
of the adult males reaching five feet in height; their color is
black, hair woolly, nearly beardless, and the body smooth. The nose is
flat, the face moderately prognathic, and the skull generally globular
(mesocephalic index 80°-81°), but on the Philippines and in Indo-China
rather dolichocephalic. Their forms are symmetrical, though they are
thin-legged, without calves; their movements agile and graceful.[151]
They are averse to culture, and depend on hunting and fishing. As
weapons, they know the bow and arrow, the lance, and the sarbacane or
blow-pipe, but have not acquired the art of chipping stone. When they
use that material, they split it by exposure to fire. They are timid
and distrustful of strangers, and they well may be, as they have been
pursued remorselessly by slave-catching pirates, and were constantly
exposed to the brutal aggressions of their stronger neighbors.