354 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



maintaining that they are sui generis, products of the soil, to be 

 considered as much or as little a distinct race as those of other 

 parts of the world, in any case differing no more from Europeans 

 than from Asiatics ? This is precisely what we should expect, if 

 the American division, with its undeniable general family likeness 

 and substantial uniformity, combined with two rather strongly 

 marked types, were really constituted in the way here set forth. 

 Ehrenreich winds up a lengthy discussion of the whole question 

 with the remark that "if the Caucasic race is to be regarded as 

 one, there is no reason for treating the American differently. It 

 were strange were it not subject to variation like the other 

 main divisions. In fact the American shows considerably more 

 uniformity when compared with the whole Caucasic division, 

 which taken in its widest sense comprises the Aryan, Semitic, 

 and Hamitic stocks, whose colour ranges from an albino white 

 through all transitional shades to the deepest black, and whose 

 skulls show every degree of dolicho- and brachycephaly. Such 

 differences also as occur in Africa amongst the Bantu negroes, 

 Hottentots, and Bushmen are not found amongst the Americans, 

 whose variability is scarcely greater than that of the Malay and 

 Mongol peoples." To me it is specially gratifying to find that 

 this careful observer of the American aborigines in almost every 

 part of the continent closes the discussion with the frank accept- 

 ance of my general conclusion that " without denying a common 

 origin of both groups [Mongol and American] it may still be 

 argued that the American offshoot has diverged sufficiently to be 

 regarded as a distinct variety in the same sense that the Mongol 

 is itself taken as a distinct variety 1 ." 



1 Eth, p. 222, quoted by Ehrenreich in Anthropologische Studien, &c., p. 44. 

 Indications of such divergence are afforded by the five anatomical peculiarities 

 of the American aborigines described by Dr Hermann Ten Kate, the most 

 characteristic of which is perhaps the form of the hyoid bone (os lingua sup- 

 porting the tongue). This observer finds that the large cornua, nearly always 

 soldered to the body of the bone in Europeans, remains distinct in the Ameri- 

 cans, as in 17 old Zuiiis, y moundbuilders, one Yahgan, a mummy from north- 

 west Argentina, another from a Patagonian cave near Lake Argentin, 3 old 

 Patagonians from the Rio Chubut, and one Brazilian. He regards the character 

 as a case of arrested development which he considers himself justified in dis- 

 tinguishing as "American" (Sur qnelques points tfosteologie ethnique, &c., in 



