PHYSICAL CHARACTERS OF RACES. 543 



timent of good and of evil ; 'he alone believes in a future existence 

 succeeding this actual life; he alone believes in beings superior to 

 himself, that he has never seen, and that are capable of influencing his 

 life for good or evil. 



In other words, man alone is endowed with morality and religion. 

 These two faculties are revealed by his acts, by his institutions, by 

 facts that differ from one group to another, from one race to another. 

 From these is drawn a third class of characters that of moral and 

 religions characters. 



Let us attend to-day to the physical characters, to those furnished 

 by the body. 



In man, as in animals, the body is made up of organs. We can not 

 only study the exterior of the body, but we can also penetrate the in- 

 terior and discover its anatomy. Indeed, this is the only means of 

 finding out its most important organs. In this study we can stop 

 with the form, the arrangement, or we can go further, and seek to un- 

 derstand the actions of the parts, the functions they perform. We 

 thus pass from anatomy to physiology. But these functions may be 

 disturbed by many maladies that cannot be neglected, and which are 

 the province of pathology. 



In our present study, we must not neglect any of these orders of 

 facts. You see how we are led to draw, from the body alone, four 

 categories of characters, namely: 1. Exterior characters; 2. Anatomic 

 characters ; 3. Physiological characters ; 4. Pathological characters. 



PHYSICAL CHARACTEES. 



I. Exterior Characters. When we see a man or an animal, the 

 first thing that strikes us is its size. Our domestic species are made 

 of great and small races, and it is the same with man. 



The extreme dimensions of the human form, whether great or 

 small, have been very much exaggerated. Everywhere there has 

 been a belief in the existence of races of dwarfs and races of giants. 

 For instance, the Greeks believed in the existence of a people, called 

 by them pigmies, whose country they placed sometimes in one direc- 

 tion, sometimes in another, but always beyond the limits of the world 

 they truly knew. These were little men about fourteen inches in 

 height, who, it was believed, were obliged to pluck down the corn with 

 strokes of the axe, and who passed a part of their time defending 

 themselves against the cranes. In the last century this fable of the 

 pigmies was, so to speak, renewed and applied to the kymos, who 

 were said to inhabit Madagascar. It is needless to add that, since we 

 have seen them more closely, pigmies and kymos have disappeared. 



The fables relative to giants are the contrary of the preceding. 

 Among these fables there are some modern ones, for a time believed 

 to be founded on real observation. The first voyagers who doubled 



