Trio of Papuans Chatting

T. H. H. Sketch - New Guinea May 1849

Huxley Archives

[209] Ethnology is the science which determines the distinctive characters of the persistent modifications of mankind; which ascertains the distribution of those modifications in present and past times, and seeks to discover the causes, or conditions of existence, both of the modifications and of their distribution. I say "persistent" modifications, because, unless incidentally, ethnology has nothing to do with chance and transitory peculiarities of human structure. And I speak of "persistent modifications" or "stocks" rather than of "varieties," or "races," or "species," because each of these last well-known terms implies, on the part of its employer, a preconceived opinion touching one of those problems, the, solution of which is the ultimate object of the [210] science; and in regard to which, therefore, etymologists are especially bound to keep their minds open and their judgments freely balanced.

Ethnology, as thus defined, is a branch of Anthropology, the great science which unravels the complexities of human structure; traces out the relations of man to other animals; studies all that is especially human in the mode in which man's complex functions are performed; and searches after the conditions which have determined his presence in the world. And anthropology is a section of Zoology, which again is the animal half of Biology–the science of life and living things.

Such is the position of ethnology, such are the objects of the ethnologist. The paths or methods, by following which he may hope to reach his goal, are diverse. He may work at man from the point of view of the pure zoologist, and investigate the anatomical and physiological peculiarities of Negroes, Australians, or Mongolians, just as he would inquire into those of pointers, terriers, and turnspits,–"persistent modifications" of man's almost universal companion. Or he may seek aid from researches into the most human manifestation of humanity–Language; and assuming that what is true of speech is true of the speaker–a hypothesis as questionable in science as it is in ordinary life–he may apply to mankind themselves the conclusions drawn from a search[211]ing analysis of their words and grammatical forms.

Or, the ethnologist may turn to the study of the practical life of men; and relying upon the inherent conservatism and small inventiveness of untutored mankind, he may hope to discover in manners and customs, or in weapons, dwellings, and other handiwork, a clue to the origin of the resemblances and differences of nations. Or, he may resort to that kind of evidence which is yielded by History proper, and consists of the beliefs of men concerning past events, embodied in traditional, or in written, testimony. Or, when that thread breaks, Archæology, which is the interpretation of the unrecorded remains of man's works, belonging to the epoch since the world has reached its present condition, may still guide him. And, when even the dim light of archæology fades, there yet remains Palæontology, which, in these latter years, has brought to daylight once more the exuvia of ancient populations, whose world was not our world, who have been buried in river beds immemorially dry, or carried by the rush of waters into caves, inaccessible to inundation since the dawn of tradition.

Along each, or all, of these paths the ethnologist may press towards his goal; but they are not equally straight, or sure, or easy to tread. The way of palæontology has but just been laid open to us. Archæological and historical investigations [212] are of great value for all those peoples whose ancient state has differed widely from their present condition, and who have the good or evil fortune to possess a history. But on taking a broad survey of the world, it is astonishing how few nations present either condition. Respecting five-sixths of the persistent modifications of mankind, history and archæology are absolutely silent. For half the rest, they might as well be silent for anything that is to be made of their testimony. And, finally, when the question arises as to what was the condition of mankind more than a paltry two or three thousand years ago, history and archæology are, for the most part, mere dumb dogs. What light does either of these branches of knowledge throw on the past of the man of the New World, if we except the Central Americans and the Peruvians; on that of the Africans, save those of the Valley of the Nile and a fringe of the Mediterranean; on that of all the Polynesian, Australian, and central Asiatic peoples, the former of whom probably, and the last certainly, were, at the dawn of history, substantially what they are now? While thankfully accepting what history has to give him, therefore, the ethnologist must not look for too much from her.

Is more to be expected from inquiries into the customs and handicrafts of man? It is to be feared not. In reasoning from identity of custom to identity of stock the difficulty always obtrudes itself, [213] that the minds of men being everywhere similar, differing in quality and quantity but not in kind of faculty, like circumstances must tend to produce like contrivances; at any rate, so long as the need to be met and conquered is of a very simple kind. That two nations use calabashes or shells for drinking-vessels, or that they employ spears, or clubs, or swords and axes of stone and metal as weapons and implements, cannot be regarded as evidence that these two nations had a common origin, or even that intercommunication ever took place between them; seeing that the convenience of using calabashes or shells for such purposes, and the advantage of poking an enemy with a sharp stick, or hitting him with a heavy one, must be early forced by nature upon the mind of even the stupidest savage. And when he had found out the use of a stick, he would need no prompting to discover the value of a chipped or whetted stone, or of an angular piece of native metal, for the same object. On the other hand, it may be doubted, whether the chances are not greatly against independent peoples arriving at the manufacture of a boomerang, or of a bow; which last, if one comes to think of it, is a rather complicated apparatus; and the tracing of the distribution of inventions as complex as these, and of such strange customs as betel-chewing and tobacco-smoking, may afford valuable ethnological hints.

[214] Since the time of Leibnitz, and guided by such men as Humboldt, Abel Remusat, and Klaproth, Philology has taken far higher ground. Thus Prichard affirms that "the history of nations, termed Ethnology, must be mainly founded on the relations of their languages."

An eminent living philologer, August Schleicher, in a recent essay, puts forward the claims of his science still more forcibly:–

Without the least desire to depreciate the value of philology as an adjuvant to ethnology, I must venture to doubt, with Rudolphi, Desmoulins, Crawfurd, and others, its title to the leading position claimed for it by the writers whom I have just quoted. On the contrary, it seems to me obvious that, though, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, unity of languages may afford a certain presumption in favour of the unity of stock of the peoples speaking those languages, it cannot be held to prove that unity of stock, unless philologers are prepared to demonstrate, that no nation can lose its language and acquire that of a distinct nation, without a change of blood corresponding with the change of language. Desmoulins long ago put this argument exceedingly well:–

It must not be imagined that the case put by Desmoulins is a merely hypothetical one. Events precisely similar to the transport of a body of Africans to the West India Islands, indeed, cannot have happened among uncivilised races, but similar results have followed the importation of bodies of conquerors among an enslaved people over and over again. There is hardly a country in Europe in which two or more nations speaking widely different tongues have not become intermixed; and there is hardly a language of Europe of which we have any right to think that its structure affords a just indication of the amount of that intermixture.

As Dr. Latham has well said:–

In other words, what philologer, if he had nothing but the vocabulary and grammar of the French and English languages to guide him, would dream of the real causes of the unlikeness of a Norman to a Provençal, of an Orcadian to a Cornishman? How readily might he be led to suppose that the different climatal conditions to which these speakers of one tongue have so long been exposed, have caused their physical differences; and how little would he suspect that these are due (as we happen to know they are) to wide differences of blood.

Few take duly into account the evidence which exists as to the ease with which unlettered savages gain or lose a language. Captain Erskine, in his interesting "Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific," especially remarks [218] upon the "avidity with which the inhabitants of the polyglot islands of Melanesia, from New Caledonia to the Solomon Islands, adopt the improvements of a more perfect language than their own, which different causes and accidental communication still continue to bring to them;" and he adds that "among the Melanesian islands scarcely one was found by us which did not possess, in some cases still imperfectly, the decimal system of numeration in addition to their own, in which they reckon only to five."

Yet how much philological reasoning in favour of the affinity or diversity of two distinct peoples has been based on the mere comparison of numerals!

But the most instructive example of the fallacy which may attach to merely philological reasonings, is that afforded by the Feejeans, who are, physically, so intimately connected with the adjacent Negritos of New Caledonia, &c., that no one can doubt to what stock they belong, and who yet, in the form and substance of their language, are Polynesian. The case is as remarkable as if the Canary Islands should have been found to be inhabited by negroes speaking Arabic, or some other clearly Semitic dialect, as their mother tongue. As it happens, the physical peculiarities of the Feejeans are so striking, and the conditions under which they live are so similar to those of the Polynesians, that no one [219] has ventured to suggest that they are merely modified Polynesians–a suggestion which could otherwise certainly have been made. But if languages may be thus transferred from one stock to another, without any corresponding intermixture of blood, what ethnological value has philology?–what security does unity of language afford us that the speakers of that language may not have sprung from two, or three, or a dozen, distinct sources?

Thus we come, at last, to the purely zoological method, from which it is not unnatural to expect more than from any other, seeing that, after all, the problems of ethnology are simply those which are presented to the zoologist by every widely distributed animal he studies. The father of modern zoology seems to have had no doubt upon this point. At the twenty-eighth page of the standard twelfth edition of the "Systema Naturæ," in fact, we find:–

Turn a few pages further on in the same volume, and there appears, with a fine impartiality in the distribution of capitals and sub-divisional headings:–

Linnæus' definition of what he considers to be mere varieties of the species Man are, it will be observed, as completely free from any illusion to linguistic peculiarities as those brief and pregnant sentences in which he sketches the characters of the varieties of the species Dog. "Pilis nigris, naribus patulis" may be set against "auriculis erectis, cauda subtus lanata;" while the remarks on the morals and manners of the human subject seem as if they were thrown in merely by way of makeweight.

Buffon, Blumenbach (the founder of ethnology as a special science), Rudolphi, Bory de St. Vincent, Desmoulins, Cuvier, Retzius, indeed I may say all the naturalists proper, have dealt with man from a no less completely zoological point of view; while, as might have been expected, those who have been least naturalists, and most linguists, have most neglected the zoological method, the neglect culminating in those who have been altogether devoid of acquaintance with anatomy.

Prichard's proposition, that language is more persistent than physical characters, is one which [222] has never been proved, and indeed admits of no proof, seeing that the records of language do not extend so far as those of physical characters. But, until the superior tenacity of linguistic over physical peculiarities is shown, and until the abundant evidence which exists, that the language of a people may change without corresponding physical change in that people, is shown to be valueless, it is plain that the zoological court of appeal is the highest for the ethnologist, and that no evidence can be set against that derived from physical characters.

What, then, will a new survey of mankind from the Linnean point of view teach us?

The great antipodal block of land we call Australia has, speaking roughly, the form of a vast quadrangle, 2,000 miles on the side, and extends from the hottest tropical, to the middle of the temperate, zone. Setting aside the foreign colonists introduced within the last century, it is inhabited by people no less remarkable for the uniformity, than for the singularity, of their physical characters and social state. For the most part of fair stature, erect and well built, except for an unusual slenderness of the lower limbs, the Australians have dark, usually chocolate-coloured skins; fine dark wavy hair; dark eyes, overhung by beetle brows; coarse, projecting jaws; broad and dilated, but not especially flattened, [223] noses, and lips which, though prominent, are eminently flexible.

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,⁴ 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 [224] to themselves, they are wholly unacquainted with bows and arrows.

It is but a step, as it were, across Bass'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 latitude 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, [225] the most notable circumstance 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 passage of Bass'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 northwest, 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 [226] 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 title 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; [227] 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 massive buildings of stone. They understood the working of the precious, though not of the useful, metals;⁵ 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;⁶ 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 coast 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 [228] black hair of the proper Americans, are generally a duller complexioned, shorter, and a more squat people, and they have still more prominent cheekbones. But the circumstance 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 same physical characters. Southward, there are indications of Esquimaux characters among the Japanese, 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, [229] 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-set⁷ 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, never much elongated, 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 surpassed 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 pass 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-philo[230]logical classification, 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 passing, 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 and west 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 largely tall, fair, blue-eyed men.

If any one should think fit to assume that, in the year 100 B.C., there was one continuous Xanthochroic population from the Rhine to the [231] 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, the Germans, the Slavonian and the Finnish tribes, to a great extent; 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 eruptions of the Mongolian stock, of which history furnishes abundant testimony. The furthermost limit of the Xanthochroi north westward is Iceland and the British Isles; southwestward, they are traceable at intervals through Syria and the Berber country, ending 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 "Tinglings" of the valley of the Yenisei is unknown.

West and south of the area occupied by the chief mass of the Xanthochroi, and north of the [232] Sahara, is a broad belt of land, shaped like a >-. 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 majority of the people inhabiting the area thus roughly defined 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.⁸ 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, [233] 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 "Dravidian" populations of Southern Hindostan lead us back, physically as well as geographically, towards the Australians;⁹ [234] 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 of the valleys of the Ganges and Indus, 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, [235] 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,¹⁰ 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.

[236] It is curious to observe that almost all the woolly-haired 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 [238] between the Faunæ and Floræ 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 Asia¹¹ and North Africa.¹²

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 [238] 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, twenty¹³ centuries ago, just what they are now, in their broad features and general distribution.

The evidence yielded by Archæology 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 [239] 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-handed¹⁴ long-headed people of the "bronze epoch," and what has become of the infusion of their blood among the Xanthochroi?

At present Paleontology 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 [240] order of things, have long been extinct. Beyond the limits of a fraction of Europe, Palæontology 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 melanochroic people are less obnoxious to its ravages than the xanthochroic. 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 [241] 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 [242] 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 [243] 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 Linnæus, Buffon, [244] Blumenbach, Cuvier, Prichard, and many distinguished living theologians.

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 [245] 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. Yet 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 [246] 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 [247] 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 farther 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 [248] 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, it you will, and you may yet, with perfect consistency, be the strictest of Monogenists, and even believe in Adam and Eve as the primeval 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.

[249] 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.

During that period the greater part of the British islands, of Central Europe, of Northern Asia, have been submerged beneath the sea and raised up again. So has the great desert of Sahara, which occupies the major part of Northern [250] Africa.¹⁵ The Caspian and the Aral seas have been one, and their united waters have probably communicated with both the Arctic and the Mediterranean oceans.¹⁶ The greater part of North America has been under water, and has emerged. It is highly probable that a large part of the Malayan Archipelago has sunk, and that its primitive continuity with Asia has been destroyed. Over the great Polynesian area subsidence has taken place to the extent of many thousands of feet–subsidence of so vast a character, in fact, that if a continent like Asia had once occupied the area of the Pacific, the peaks of its mountains would now show not more numerous than the islands of the Polynesian Archipelago.¹⁷

What lands may have been thickly populated for untold ages, and subsequently have disappeared and left no sign above the waters, it is of course impossible for us to say; but unless we are to make the wholly unjustifiable assumption that no dry land rose elsewhere when our present dry land sank, there must be half-a-dozen Atlantises beneath the waves of the various oceans of the world. But if the regions which have undergone [251] these slow and gradual, but immense alterations, were wholly or in part inhabited before the changes I have indicated began–and it is more probable that they were than that they were not–what a wonderfully efficient "Emigration Board" must have been at work all over the world long before canoes, or even rafts, were invented; and before men were impelled to wander by any desire nobler or stronger than hunger. And as these rude and primitive families were thrust, in the course of long series of generations, from land to land, impelled by encroachments of sea or of marsh, or by severity of summer heat or winter cold, to change their positions, what opportunities must have been offered for the play of natural selection, in preserving one family variation and destroying another!

Suppose, for example, that some families of a horde which had reached a land charged with the seeds of yellow fever, varied in the direction of woolliness of hair and darkness of skin. Then, if it be true that these physical characters are accompanied by comparative or absolute exemptions from that scourge, the inevitable tendency would be to the preservation and multiplication of the darker and woollier families, and the elimination of the whiter and smoother haired. In fact, by the operation of causes precisely similar to those which, in the famous instance cited by Mr. Darwin, have given rise to a race of black pigs in [252] the forests of Louisiana, a negro stock would eventually people the region.¹⁸ Again, how often, by such physical changes, must a stock have been isolated from all others for innumerable generations, and have found ample time for the hereditary hardening of its special peculiarities into the enduring characters of a persistent modification.

Nor, if it be true that the physiological differences of species may be produced by variation and natural selection, as Mr. Darwin supposes, would it be at all astonishing, if, in some of these separated stocks, the process of differentiation should have gone so far as to give rise to the phenomena of hybridity. In the face of the overwhelming evidence in favour of the unity of the origin of mankind afforded by anatomical considerations, satisfactory proof of the existence of any degree of sterility in the unions of members of two of the "persistent modifications" of mankind, might well be appealed to by Mr. Darwin as crucial evidence of the truth of his views regarding the origin of species in general.

¹ August Schleicher. Ueber die Bedeutung der Sprache für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen, pp. 16-18. Weimar, 1858.

² Desmoulins, Histoire Naturelle des Races Humaines, p. 345, 1826.

³ Latham, Man and his Migrations, p.171.

⁴ [At cape York we found that the natives had learned from their Papuan neighbours to grow a little coarse tobacco; and elsewhere, yams are said to be grown, but hardly cultivated. Plaiting, basket-making, and netting are practiced–1894.]

⁵ [With the exception of copper and bronze.–1894.]

⁶ [A suspicion subsequently verified. See a memoir on American Skulls, Journal of Anatomy and Physiology. Vol. 16.–1894.]

⁷ [The obliquity it must be recollected, is not in the position of the eyeball but arises from the arrangement of the skin in the neighbourhood of the eyelids–1894.]

⁸ [See the Essay on the Aryan Question, in this volume, for some qualifications of these statements necessitated by further knowledge. 1894.]

⁹ [Of the affinities of these stocks I think there can be no doubt. I was formerly inclined to believe that the ancient Egyptian was the highest term in an ascending series: Australian–Dravidian–Egyptian of allied stocks. And I believe still that there is a good deal to be said for that hypothesis. One of the most interesting problems at present is the relation of the pre-semitic population of Babylonia to the Dravidians, on the one hand, and the Old Egyptian on the other. Only one point appears to me to be quite clear, if the statues of Tell Loh represent these people, that there is not a trace of Mongolian affinity about them.–1894.]

¹⁰ 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.

¹¹ [Hindostan excepted.–1894]

¹² [Egypt excepted.–1894]

¹³ [We may now safely say thirty or forty.–1894]

¹⁴ [Supposed to be small-handed from the small handles of their bronze swords. But I observe in the Assyrian sculptures the same small handles, while the hands are by no means small. How did the Assyrians use their swords? So far as I know thrusting alone is represented.–1894.]

¹⁵ [Later investigations tend to show that only a small part of the Sahara has been submerged.–1894.]

¹⁶ [With reference to certain reclamations that have been made a propos of a speculation set forth in the essay on the Aryan Question (infra), I draw attention to the fact that this passage was written twenty-nine years ago.–1894.]

¹⁷ [The occurrence of this extensive subsidence is disputed.–1894.]

¹⁸ [Mr. Pearson, in his very interesting work On National Life and Character, justly dwells upon the obstacles to the existence of the white races within the Tropics. There is, however, this point to be considered, that the fevers to which the white men succumb are probably caused by microbes; and that modern therapeutic science is daily teaching us more and more about the ways of obtaining immunity from or alleviating these attacks. What would become of black competition if fever "vaccination" proved effectual?–1894.]

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"Waitcha"

Cape York Woman with Baby

Huxley Archives

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Preface and Table of Contents to Volume VII, Man's Place in Nature, of Huxley's Collected Essays.

Next article: On Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology [1871], pages 253-270.

Previous article: On Some Fossil Remains of Man, pages 157-209.

PREVIEW TABLE of CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHIES 1.   THH Publications 2.   Victorian Commentary 3.   20th Century Commentary INDICES 1.   Letter Index 2.   Illustration Index TIMELINE FAMILY TREE Gratitude and Permissions C. Blinderman & D. Joyce Clark University 1998

THE HUXLEY FILE

GUIDES § 1. THH: His Mark § 2. Voyage of the Rattlesnake § 3. A Sort of Firm § 4. Darwin's Bulldog § 5. Hidden Bond: Evolution § 6. Frankensteinosaurus § 7. Bobbing Angels: Human Evolution § 8. Matter of Life: Protoplasm § 9. Medusa § 10. Liberal Education § 11. Scientific Education § 12. Unity in Diversity § 13. Agnosticism § 14. New Reformation § 15. Verbal Delusions: The Bible § 16. Miltonic Hypothesis: Genesis § 17. Extremely Wonderful Events: Resurrection and Demons § 18. Emancipation: Gender and Race § 19. Aryans et al.: Ethnology § 20. The Good of Mankind § 21.  Jungle Versus Garden