Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 469 



black races of mankind. The wide extent upon the globe of a 

 people having the same physical peculiarities, is indicated, in a re- 

 markable manner, by the tact, that the characters described by Sir 

 Everard Home, as existing in the Papuan of New Guinea brought 

 to England by Sir Stamford llaffles, are identical with those assign- 

 ed to the inhabitants of Van Diemen's Land, so far distant to the 

 south of New Guinea, by M. I'eron and other naturalists. 



This view of the subject, if followed out into particulars, woul^ 

 probably remove many of the dilHculties and contradictions in which 

 the history of the biack people of India and the southern Archipe- 

 lagos, is at present involved. There is one circumstance, however, 

 in the natural history of these people, and that one of equal diffi- 

 culty and interest, which, it must be acknowledged, would still 

 remain unexplained: viz. The strong resemblance, as well mental 

 as physical, which the lowest of the Papuan race, in intelligence, 

 and in the scale of humanity in general (the natives of Van Die- 

 men's Land, for example^ bear to the Hottentots of Southern 

 Africa ; notwithstanding, that, as stated above, the entire history 

 of ihe Papuan race is inimical to the supposition of its being derived 

 from Africa; — notwithstanding the facts (forming part of that hi- 

 story) that although the extreme aberrant varieties of this group of 

 ntankind, and of that formed by the African Negro race (applying 

 to the natural history of man some of the terms introduced into phi- 

 losophic zoology by Mr. W. S. Macleay) are thus similar in charac- 

 ter, — the intermediate varieties, as well as the normal or sub-typical 

 Papuans of New Guinea and Negros of equatorial Africa, are ma- 

 nifestly distinct in character,being(as inhabitants of those countries, at 

 least, 1 descended from different stocks. Kut this circumstance, ap- 

 parently so anomalous, may be explained, probably, by the consi- 

 deration, that, in these two sets of peojile, forming the zero points, 

 as it were, of their respective races, we behold the human species, 

 though derived from different stocks, and thus deviating from the 

 type l)y different routes, in parallel extreme states of degradation, 

 — equalhj distant, that is, from the type of the species, or the sum- 

 mit of the scale of human perfection 



The principal facts from which the foregoing deductions have 

 been made, will be found in the following works: Lawrence's Lec- 

 tures on Physiology, &c. First Edit, p 568, &c. ; Prichard's Re- 

 searches into the Physical History of Mankind, vol. i. ; Virey, Uiist. 

 Nat. da Genre Ilnmajn, 18'i4, torn. i. p. 499. tom. ii. p. 16; uud 

 Julius Klaproth's Essay on the Authority of the Asiatic Historians, 

 us translated in the Asiat. Journ. vol. xvi. p. 21G, et acq. 



E. W. P,. 



<;»tJKSTIONS AS TO THE CtJNTIN U ATION OF ArFTAIUKKROlTS 

 VF.IN'S FRO.M PRIMARY INTO SECONDARY I'Oll.AI A 11 ONS. HY 

 A CORRFSl'ONnENT. 



To the Editors of the Phil. Mag. and Journ. (if Science. 

 Gentlemen, 

 In Cornwall, the same veins, without interruption, traverse both 



