vii.] METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 161 



deviations ; and out of this, by some strange intellectual 

 hocus-pocus, grew up the notion that the Caucasian man 

 is the prototypic &quot;Adamic&quot; man, and his country the 

 primitive centre of our kind. Perhaps the most curious 

 thing of all is, that the said Georgian skull, after all, is 

 not a skull of average form, but distinctly belongs to the 

 brachycephalic group. 



With the third proposition I am quite disposed to 

 agree, though it must be recollected that it is one thing 

 to allow that a given migration is possible, and another 

 to admit there is good reason to believe it has really 

 taken place. 



But I can find no sufficient ground for accepting the 

 fourth proposition ; and I doubt if it would ever have 

 obtained its general currency except for the circumstance 

 that fair Europeans are very readily tanned and em 

 browned by the sun. But I am not aware that there 

 is a particle of proof that the cutaneous change thus 

 effected can become hereditary, any more than that the 

 enlarged livers, which plague our countrymen in India, 

 can be transmitted ; while there is very strong evidence 

 to the contrary. Not only, in fact, are there such cases 

 as those of the English families in Barbadoes, who have 

 remained for six generations unaltered in complexion, but 

 which are open to the objection that they may have 

 received infusions of fresh European blood ; but there is 

 the broad fact, that not a single indigenous Negro exists 

 either in the great alluvial plains of tropical South 

 America, or in the exposed islands of the Polynesian 

 Archipelago, or among the populations of equatorial 

 Borneo or Sumatra. No satisfactory explanation of 

 these obvious difficulties has been offered by the advo 

 cates of the direct influence of conditions. And as for 

 the more important modifications observed in the struc 

 ture of the brain, and in the form of the skull, no one 



