312 Dr Prichard on the Belations of Ethnology 



collectively the whole human family. This distribution was 

 complete as far as the ethnographical knowledge of the 

 time allowed it to be ; but it would be necessary in the present 

 day to enumerate many additional varieties in the shape of 

 the skull, and to constitute additional human races, if we 

 would follow the same method, and adapt it to the actual 

 state of our acquaintance with distant regions of the earth 

 and their inhabitants. For example, besides the Ethiopian 

 race of Blumenbach, by which he meant the Negroes, we 

 must reckon in Africa two other woolly-haired races, each 

 having a form of the head diiferent from the Ethiopian type 

 of Blumenbach. I allude to the Kafir and Hottentot races. 

 Again, among the nations termed collectively by Blumen- 

 bach the Malayan race, meaning the native people of all the 

 islands of the Great Southern Ocean, we now distinguish 

 several different forms which have little or nothing in com- 

 mon, and appear to belong to several distinct races. Among 

 these are the Papuas, who resemble the Negroes in many 

 respects, but have skulls of a form very different from any of 

 the African nations, and the Australians having a peculiar 

 type, and forming a very distinct race. The Polynesians are 

 not so distinct in the form of their heads as Blumenbach 

 supposed the Malayan race to be ; and the true Malays ap- 

 proach in features, and apparently in their general physical 

 character, to the other native races of the Indo-Chinese pe- 

 ninsula, who are described as nearly resembling the Chinese, 

 and who probably belong to the class of nations termed by 

 Blumenbach Mongolian. Blumenbach's delineations of 

 skulls are admirable, and his descriptions of the forms which 

 appeared to him the most prevalent and the most constant, 

 are invaluable. There is, however, one very important view 

 of the shape of the head which he seems to have over- 

 looked ; I allude to the form of the basis of the skull. The 

 importance of this view of the cranium in comparing the 

 heads of the human species and those of apes, in which it dis- 

 plays the immense difference between them in a very strik- 

 ing manner, was first pointed out by Professor Owen. It is 

 a character by no means to be neglected in the comparison 

 of human races with each other. 



