TIIK HALP-BRRED. 3 



to trace the slow progress of racial divergence aud dispersion into the regions of the earth 

 now inhabited l>y man. If his genealogy and chart of dispersion are, as all snch under- 

 takings ninst be, largely made up of conjecture, his scheme is, in its main features, rational 

 and fruitfully suggestive. If he has not discovered the very truth as to the development 

 of the hviman races, he hns, at least, indicated the path that may lead to the desired goal. 

 We are not bound to accept Lemuria, nor to believe that the monuments of the first men, 

 if they left any behind them, lie at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Neither need we 

 regard with equal favour all the details of his genealogies. But his classification and plan 

 of distril)ution may be adopted, with necessary modifications as fresh light is shed on the 

 su.bject, no matter where we fix our central starting-point. M. de Quatrefages, for instance, 

 locates the first members of the family of mankind in the vast plateau bounded on the 

 south and south-west by the Himalayas, on the west by the Bolor Mountains, on the north- 

 west ])y the Ala-Tan, on the north by the Altai range and its offshoots, on the east by the 

 King-Khan, on the south and south-east by the Felina aud Kuen-lun ; around that region 

 he finds grouped the fundamental types of all the human races, the black races being the 

 farthest from it. No other part of the globe, M. de Quatrefages urges, presents such a union 

 of extreme human types distributed around a common centre, and, after stating some objec- 

 tions to his view, he concludes that no facts have yet come to light which authorize the 

 placing of the cradle of mankind elsewhere than in Asia.' If however, as M. de Quatrefages 

 himself is inclined to believe, Abbé Bourgeois has proved the existence of Tertiary man, 

 it is absolutely vain to look for any certainty as to his primal abode. One thing we may take 

 for granted — that, wherever man originated, he must soon have spread out in various direc- 

 tions ; and thus, step by step, the different zones were occupied and the process of differ- 

 entiation went on, climate and the other manifold environments exerting their natural 

 inffuence. In an article contributed to Nature (November 6th, 1884), Mr. A. F. Fraser states 

 that wherever the sun is hottest all the year roimd, " the blacker are the natives down to 

 the equator of heat." The line in question, as traced by the late Dr. Draper, enters Africa 

 along the coast of the Grulf of Guinea ; then, rising to about 15°, it crosses the continent, 

 escaping from the eastern promontory at Cape Guardafui ; it intersects the most southerly 

 portion of Hindostan ; then crossing the earth's equator, it passes through the midst of the 

 Eastern Archipelago, and returning through America traA'erses this continent at its narrowest 

 point, the Isthmus of Panama. The recession of the Mediterranean from the Desert of 

 Sahara, in the opinion of the same philosophic writer, and its contraction within its pre- 

 sent limits, had doubtless much to do with the possibility of negro life." On the other hand, 

 he maintains that the conditions for its production did not exist in America. For, whereas 

 the range of equatorial warmth in Africa is 4,000 miles, in Central America it is only fifty- 

 one. It may also be that eqi;atorial America has been occupied for a period too short to dye 

 the skin of the natives as that of the Central African has been dyed. At any rate, we know 

 that, though the negro lives with comfort in intertropical America, as though it were his 

 native habitat, he is merely an importation to its shores, where most likely he would never 

 have lauded had not his white master brought him thither by force. But even those who 

 msist that nearness to the heat of the equator has been the main cause of the negro's 

 blackness have to concede the dark-skinned tendency in races situated towards the Pole. 



' The Human Species, p. 17.5. ^ History of the American War, i. 122. 



