564 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE LAST TWENTY YEARS. 



tbiopologist. Some may be able to see him in their dreams, but v\heu 

 awake they will not be able to say that they have met him. Even the 

 hope of a future discovery of this proauthropos is highly improbable, 

 for we are not living in a dream, or an ideal world, but in a real one. 



At our meeting in Innspruck it looked as if it might become possible 

 to demnstrate amid the excitement, the descent of man from the mon- 

 key or some other animal. At i)resent to our regret we do not even 

 possess the means to prove a descent of the individual races from one 

 another. It was not known at that time how difficult it is to prove that 

 all men are brethren, nevertheless laborious attempts were made to show 

 the unity of mankind. 



There was an inclination to single out individual skulls and skele- 

 tons found among the remains of men in caves, as for instance in the 

 caves of the " Maasthal ",) as representative tyi)es, and from them 

 make up the races of primitive ages. Some claimed the original race 

 to have been Mongoloid, others contended that the first man was Aus- 

 tralioid. It all depended on the question whether the Mongolians or 

 the Australians were the lowest race. The first European nuist have 

 looked like one of them, it was said. But the first European has not 

 yet been found. At preseiit we know that judging from his remains, 

 primitive man did not resemble a monkey anj^ more than do men of 

 to-day. Theancients were well formed, they bore the same characteristic 

 marks which we find in men of our times; not a single one was so 

 poorly developed as to justify us in saying that he possessed the lowest 

 form of skull. 



Twenty years ago little was known of the skull forms of the lowest 

 primitive nations. This accounts for hasty judgments passed; the 

 wildest ideas were afloat about the make up of the lowest tribes. No 

 one possessed any exact idea concerning the physical construction of 

 the Eskimos, Patagonians, etc. To-day there is scarcely upon our 

 earth a tribe which might be called entirely unknown. There is only 

 one place where there is some possibility of new discoveries, — I mean 

 the peninsula of Malacca ; — but even in this place we have an energetic 

 agent at work. Its inhabitants, according to the results of the re- 

 searches of some, seem to satisfy most nearly the demands made for a 

 lowes trace. Aside from these we know them all, — Patagonians, Eski- 

 mos, Bushmen, Veddas, Laplanders, Austrabans, Polynesians, Mela 

 iiesians ; about many of them we really know more than of European 

 nations. 



If for instance you take the case of individual islanders and com- 

 pare them with Albanians, 1 may say that more investigations have 

 been made concerning the Polynesian natives than concerning separate 

 groups of Albanians. All these uncivilized nations, which stand so 

 low in their mental development, are becoming gradually known to us. 

 Of most of them we have in Europe good typical examples, concerning 

 whom the most exact observations in respect to their whole organiza- 



