386 EVIDENCE DERIVABLE FROM PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 



race immense geographical changes have taken place, that 

 continent has become ocean, and sea, land. The Negroes are 

 essentially a non-navigating race ; they build no ships, and 

 even the canoes of the Fijians are evidently copied from those 

 of the Polynesians. Now what is the geographical distribution 

 of the race ? They occupy all Africa south of the Sahara, 

 which neither they nor the rest of the true African fauna 

 have ever crossed ; and though they do not occur in Arabia, 

 Persia, Hindostan, Siam, or China, we find them in Mada- 

 gascar, and in the Andaman Islands, not in Java, Sumatra, 

 or Borneo, but in the Malay peninsula, in the Philippines, 

 New Guinea, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, the Figi 

 Islands, and in Tasmania. 



This remarkable distribution is perhaps most easily expli- 

 cable on the hypothesis that since the Negroid race came into 

 existence there must have been an immense tract of land or a 

 chain of islands stretching from the eastern coast of Africa 

 right across the Indian Ocean, and secondly, that sea then 

 occupied the area of the present great desert. In whatever 

 manner, however, these facts are to be explained, they certainly 

 indicate that the Negro race is of very great antiquity. 



I have often been much struck, when standing at the feet 

 of glaciers, by the great size of the terminal moraines, and the 

 length of time which must have been required for their for- 

 mation. Let us take as an instance the Nisjard glacier in the 



o o 



Justedal, on the Sognefjord. The Norwegian glaciers no doubt 

 covered formerly a much larger area than that which they 

 now occupy. They retreated as the cold diminished; but we 

 have already seen that man was present in Western Europe 

 when the general temperature was several degrees at least 

 lower than it is at present ; and we shall probably, therefore, 

 be within the mark if we suppose that the glacier at Justedal 

 has retreated at least a mile up the valley since the period of 

 the river-drift gravels, and the entrance of man into Europe. 



