

744 PRIMA TES 



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is made up, not of extreme or typical, but of more or less general- 

 ised or intermediate forms, the relative numbers of which are 

 continually increasing, as the long-existing isolation of nations and 

 races breaks down under the ever-extending intercommunication 

 characteristic of the period in which we live. 



The difficulties of framing a natural classification of Man, or 

 one really representing the relationship of the various minor groups 

 to each other, are well exemplified by a study of the numerous 

 attempts which have been made from the time of Linnaeus and 

 Blumenbach onwards. Even in the first step of establishing certain 

 primary groups of equivalent rank there has been no accord. Thus 

 four primitive types were sketched out by Linnaeus — the European, 

 Asiatic, African, and American. These were expanded into five 

 by Blumenbach by the addition of the Malay, 1 and reduced by 

 Cuvier to three by the suppression of the last two. Many later 

 writers have largely increased the number of these so-called primary 

 divisions, but the conclusion, so often arrived at by various anthro- 

 pologists, and so often abandoned for some more complex system, 

 that the primitive man, whatever he may have been, has in the 

 course of ages divaricated into three extreme types, represented by 

 the Caucasian of Europe, the Mongolian of Asia, and the Ethiopian 

 of Africa, and that all existing individuals of the species can be 

 ranged around these types, or somewhere or other between them, 

 seems, on the whole, to give the clearest view of the facts of the 

 case. Large numbers are doubtless the descendants of direct 

 crosses in varying proportions between well-established extreme 

 forms ; for, notwithstanding opposite views formerly held by some 

 authors on this subject, there is now abundant evidence of the 

 wholesale production of new races in this way. Others may be 

 the descendants of the primitive stock before the strongly marked 

 existing distinctions had taken place, and therefore present, though 

 from a different cause from the last, equally generalised characters. 

 In these cases it can only be by most carefully examining and 

 balancing all characters, however minute, and finding out in what 

 direction the preponderance lies, that a place can be assigned to 

 them. It cannot be too often insisted on that the various groups 

 of mankind, owing to their probable unity of origin, the great 

 variability of individuals, and the possibility of all degrees of 

 intermixture of races at remote or recent periods of the history of 

 the species, have so much in common that it is extremely difficult 

 to find distinctive characters capable of strict definition by which 

 they may be differentiated. It is more by the preponderance of 

 certain characters in a large number of members of a group, than 

 by the exclusive or even constant possession of these characters 



1 The Malay of Blumenbach was a strange conglomeration of the then little 

 known Australian, Papuan, and true Malay types. 



