124 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



As it is with individual life, so families, tribes, and 

 nations, most likely even races, pass away : in debat- 

 able regions, their tenure is only provisional, until the 

 typical form appears, when they are extinguished, or 

 found to abandon all open territories not positively 

 assigned them by nature, to make room for those to 

 whom they are genial. This effect is, itself, a criterion 

 of an abnormal origin, for a parent stock, a typical 

 form of the present genus or species, perhaps with the 

 sole exception of the now extinct Flatheads, is, we 

 believe, indestructible and ineffaceable. No change 

 of food or circumstances can sweep away the tropical 

 woolly haired man ; no event, short of a general cata- 

 clysis, can transfer his centre of existence to another ; 

 nor can any known cause dislodge the beardless type 

 from the primeval high north-eastern region of Asia 

 and its icy shores. The white or bearded form, parti- 

 cularly that section which has little or no admixture, 

 and is therefore quite fair, can only live, not thrive, in 

 the two extremes of temperature. It exists in them 

 solely as a master race, and must be maintained therein 

 by foreign influences ; and the intermediate regions, as 

 we have seen, were in part yielded to the Mongolia on 

 one side, and but temporarily obtained, by extermina- 

 tion, from the wooliy naired on the other. . 



