586 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



flora and fauna of the earth. Where, as in Africa and Australia, 

 there is marked individuality in the lower forms of life, there 

 is also to be found an extreme type of the human species. 

 Where, on the other hand, realms, like the Oriental one which 

 covers southeastern Asia and the Malay Archipelago, have drawn 

 upon the north and the south alike for both their flora and fauna, 

 several types of man have also immigrated and crossed with one 

 another. Often the dividing lines between distinct realms for 

 varieties of man, animal, and plant coincide quite exactly. The 

 Sahara Desert, once a sea, and not the present Mediterranean, as 

 we shall show, divides the true negro from the European, as it 

 does the Ethiopian zoological and botanical realm from its neigh- 

 bor. Thus the Berber of Tunis, on page 580, is properly placed in 

 our series of European types. The Andes, the Rocky Mountains, 

 and the Himalayas, divide types of all forms of life alike, in- 

 cluding man. Even that remarkable line which Alfred Russel 

 Wallace so vividly describes in Island Life, which divides the 

 truly insular fauna and flora from those of the continent of Asia, 

 is duplicated among men near by. The sharp division line for 

 plants and animals between Bali and Lombok we have shown 

 upon the map. It is but a short distance farther east, between 

 Timor and Flores, where we suddenly pass from the broad-headed, 

 straight-haired Asiatic Malay to the long-headed and frizzled 

 Melanesian savage to the group which includes the Papuans of 

 New Guinea and the Australian.* 



Following out this study of man in his natural migrations just 

 as we study the lower animals, it can be shown that the differences 

 in geographical localization between the human and other forms 

 of life are merely of degree. The whole matter is reducible at 

 bottom to terms of physical geography, producing areas of char- 

 acterization. Where great changes in the environment occur, 

 where oceans or mountain chains divide, or where river systems 

 unite geographical areas, we discover corresponding effects upon 

 the distribution of human as of other animal types. This is not 

 because the environment has directly generated those peculiari- 

 ties in each instance ; certainly no such result can be shown in 

 respect of the head form. It is because the several varieties of 

 man or other mammals have been able to preserve their individu- 

 ality through geographical isolation from intermixture, or contra- 

 riwise, as the case may be, have merged it in a conglomerate whole 

 compounded of all immigrant types alike. In this sense man in 

 his physical constitution is almost as much a creature of environ- 

 ment as the lower orders of life. Even in Europe he has not yet 



* A good ethnological map of this region is given in Fr. Ratzel's History of Mankind, i, 

 p. 144. 



