FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 177 



single skull which is not bisected longitudinally — until 

 the angles and measurements here mentioned, together 

 with a number of others of which I cannot speak in this 

 place, are determined, and tabulated with reference to the 

 basicranial axis as unity, for large numbers of skulls of the 

 different races of Mankind, I do not think we shall have 

 any very safe basis for that ethnological craniology which 

 aspires to give the anatomical characters of the crania of 

 the different Races of Mankind. 



At present, I believe that the general outlines of what 

 may be safely said upon that subject may be summed up 

 in a very few words. Draw a line on a globe from the 

 Gold Coast in Western Africa to the steppes of Tartary. 

 At the southern and western end of that line there live 

 the most dolichocephalic, prognathous, curly-haired, dark- 

 skinned of men — the true Negroes. At the northern and 

 eastern end of the same line there live the most brachy- 

 cephalic, orthognathous, straight-haired, yellow-skinned 

 of men — the Tartars and Calmucks. The two ends of this 

 imaginary line are indeed, so to speak, ethnological anti- 

 podes. A line drawn at right angles, or nearly so, to this 

 polar line through Europe and Southern Asia to Hindos- 

 tan, would give us a sort of equator, around which round- 

 headed, oval-headed, and oblong-headed, prognathous and 

 orthognathous, fair and dark races — but none possessing 

 the excessively marked characters of Calmuck or Negro — 

 group themselves. 



It is worthy of notice that the regions of the antipodal 

 races are antipodal in climate, the greatest contrast the 

 world affords, perhaps, being that between the damp, hot, 

 steaming, alluvial coast plains of the West Coast of Africa 

 and the arid, elevated steppes and plateaux of Central 

 Asia, bitterly cold in winter, and as far from the sea as 

 any part of the world can be. 

 8* 



