THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 759 



The jet or coal black color is not very widespread. It occurs in 

 a narrow and more or less broken belt across Africa just south 

 of the Sahara Desert, with a few scattering bits farther south on 

 the same continent. Another center of dissemination of this 

 characteristic, although widely separated from it, occurs in the 

 islands southeast of New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean, in the dis- 

 trict which is known from this dark color of its populations as 

 Melanesia. Next succeeding this type in depth of color is the 

 main body of negroes, of Australians, and of the aborigines of 

 India. This second or brownish group in the above-named order 

 shades off from deep chocolate through coffee-color down to olive 

 and light or reddish brown. The American Indians fall within 

 this class, because, while reddish in tinge, the skin has a strong 

 brown undertone. In the Americas we find the color quite vari- 

 able, ranging all the way from the dark Peruvians and the Mexi- 

 cans to the aborigines north of the United States. The Poly- 

 nesians are allied to this second group, characterized by a red- 

 brown skin. A third class, in which the skin is of a yellow 

 shade, covers most of Asia, the northern third of Africa, and 

 Brazil, including a number of widely scattered peoples such as 

 the Lapps, the Eskimos, the Hottentots and Bushmen of South 

 Africa, together with most of the people of Malaysia. Among 

 these the skin varies from a dull leather color, through a golden 

 or buff to a muddy white. In all cases the shading is in no wise 

 continuous or regular. Africa contains all three types of color 

 from the black Dinkas to the yellow Hottentots. In Asia and 

 the Americas all tints obtain except the jet black. There are all 

 grades of transitional shading. Variations within the same tribe 

 are not inconsiderable, so that no really sharp line of demarca- 

 tion anywhere occurs. 



The fourth color group which we have to study in this paper 

 is alone highly concentrated in the geographical sense. It forms 

 the so-called white race, although many of its members are almost 

 brown and often yellow in skin color. As we shall show, its real 

 determinant characteristic is, paradoxically, not primarily the skin 

 but the pigmentation of the hair and eyes. Nevertheless, so far as 

 it may be used in classification, the very light shades of skin are re- 

 stricted to Europe, including perhaps part of modern Africa north 

 of the Sahat'H, which geologically belongs to the northern conti- 

 nent. There is a narrow belt of rather light-skinned peoples run- 

 ning off to the southeast into Asia, including the Persians and 

 some high- caste Hindus. This offshoot vanishes in the Ganges 

 Valley in the prevailing dark skin of the aboriginal inhabitants 

 of India. The only entirely isolated bit of very light skin else- 

 where occurs among the Ainos in northern Japan ; but these peo- 

 ple are so few in number and so abnormal in other respects that 



