l6 TRANS. ST. LOUIS ACAD. SCIENCE. 



formed, at a primitive date, by the mixture of black and yellow 

 types ; but there would seem to be no good reason for doubting 

 that the brown color was contemporaneous with the earliest evo- 

 lution of human types ; and the immense area occupied by the 

 brown races, between the yellow and white types on one side and 

 the black type on the other, would seem to furnish strong evi- 

 dence that such must have been the truth. 



Those ethnologists who have taken a minute survey of the hu- 

 man family, as it is now distributed over the earth, have found it 

 difficult to define the number of distinct races. On such superfi- 

 cial survey, the number has grown from five or seven to twenty, 

 sixty, or more than a hundred. The strictly ethnographical re- 

 view of Dr. Latham, like that of Dr. Pritchard, taking the races 

 and peoples as they now are, and without much regard to their 

 geological history in time, or to the question of race in the sense 

 of natural lineage, finds them gradually merging into each other 

 in form, color, capacity, language, and customs. Dr. Pickering 

 experienced a like embarrassment in distinguishing as many as 

 eleven races. But it has now become necessary to consider the 

 human races as we do animals and plants in reference to lines of 

 descent and travel over different surfaces in times stretching back- 

 ward into the geological periods. In this deeper view, and with 

 due regard to geogi-aphical distribution, the several distinct bands 

 of color and type above specified become perceptible, though at 

 the present time they appear to shade off' by almost insensible 

 degrees into each other, like the bands of color in the solar 

 spectrum. 



it is much the same in respect of stature. These distinct bands 

 of color and type, compared as wholes, show an average differ- 

 ence of stature and size of brain, while the gradations are con- 

 siderable within each band. The best authorities find that the 

 mean internal capacity of the skull in the white race is 92.-^ cubic 

 inches ; in the American reddish-brown race, 87.5 ; in the Asiatic 

 yellow race, 87.1 ; and in the black race, 81.9. In stature, the 

 Australian Negroes, the Negritos, the Mincopies and Veddahs of 

 the east, and the Buschmen, Hottentots, Akkas, Obongos and 

 other tribes of Africa, are by whole peoples only about 4^ feet 

 in height ; the yellow Asiatics are in general short and slender, 

 many tribes being only 5 to 5^ feet in height ; the brown and 



