146 Dr Morton's Cranioloi/icul Collection. 



tions as the true Antochthones , the primeval inhabitants of this vast 

 continent ; and when I speak of tlieir being of one race, or of one ori- 

 gin, I aUude only to their indigenous relation to each other, as shewn 

 in all those attributes of mind and body which have been so amply 

 illustrated by modern ethnography. 



But to return to my collection of skulls. It also contains the em- 

 balmed heads of upwards of 130 ancient Ecvptians, taken from the 

 tombs of Memphis, Thebes, Abidos, &c. These unexampled ma- 

 terials, for which I am chiefly indebted to the kindness and zeal of my 

 friend Mr George R. Gleddon, have enabled me to prove, I believe, 

 incontestably, that the Egyptains had no national affiliation with the 

 Negro race. Their cranial characteristics can be distinguished at a 

 glance ; and the two nations, who are constantly represented side by 

 side on the pictorial monuments of the Nile, are as different from 

 each other as the White man and the Negro of the present day ; and 

 yet these contrasts look back to a period of time little short of 5000 

 years from the present day.* 



My later investigations have confirmed me in the opinion, that 

 the valley of the Nile was inhabited by an indigenous race before 

 the invasion of the Hamitic and other Asiatic nations ; and that 

 this primeval people, who occupied the whole of Northern Africa, 

 bore much the same relation to the Berber or Bei'abra tribes of Nu- 

 bia, that the Saracens of the middle ages bore to their wandering 

 and untutored, yet cognate brethren, the Bedouins of the desert. 



Egypt, during the historical period, bears ample evidence of an 

 Asiatic civilization engrafted on the rudimentary arts of the pri- 

 meval inhabitants of the valley of the Nile ; at the same time that our 

 present knowledge, vastly augmented as it has been of late years, 

 does not yet enable us to decide how much to ascribe to the con- 

 quering and how much to the conquered nation. 



But with respect to the ancient Egyptians themselves, the denizens 

 of the soil during the Pharaonic dynasties, how completely are they 

 everywhere identified, on the monuments and in their tombs, as a 

 people of peculiar national physiognomy, which mingles the Japetic 

 conformation, on the one hand, with the Semetic on the other; thus 

 placing them, in the ethnographic scale, intermediate between the 

 two ! 



While, however, the pure Egyptian of the monuments is every- 

 where identified at a glance, those same monuments and the asso- 

 ciated tombs, enable us also to detect the various exotic races with 

 whom the Egyptians had intercourse in war or in peace. Among 

 these are seen the people of Pelasgic origin, whose enbalmed 

 bodies are so frequent in Memphis, and whose great number is ac- 

 counted for by the long period of Ptolemaic rule ; — the Semitic na- 

 tions, as seen in the Hebrew and Arab cast of features ; — the Scythians, 



* See Bockh, Bunsen, Henry, &c. 



