HOMINID^E 749 



north-west, and produced a modification of the physical characters, 

 especially of the hair. This influence did not extend across Bass's 

 Straits into Tasmania, where, as just said, the Melanesian element 

 remained in its purity. It is more strongly marked in the northern 

 and central parts of Australia than on many portions of the southern 

 and western coasts, where the lowness of type and more curly hair, 

 sometimes closely approaching to frizzly, show a stronger retention 

 of the Melanesian element. If the evidence should prove sufficiently 

 strong to establish this view of the origin of the Australian natives, 

 it will no longer be correct to speak of a primitive Australian, or 

 even Australoid, race or type, or look for traces of the former 

 existence of such a race anywhere out of their own land. Absolute 

 proof of the origin of any race is, however, very difficult, if not 

 impossible, to obtain, and there is nothing to exclude the possibility 

 of the Australians being mainly the direct descendants of a very 

 primitive human type, from which the frizzly-haired Negroes may 

 be an offset. This character of hair is probably a specialisation, 

 for it seems very unlikely that it was the attribute of the common 

 ancestors of the human race. 



E. The fourth branch of the Negroid race consists of the 

 diminutive round-headed people called Negritos, still found in a 

 pure or unmixed state in the Andaman Islands, and forming a 

 substratum of the population, though now greatly mixed with in- 

 vading races, especially Malays, in the Philippines, and many of 

 the islands of the Indo- Malay an Archipelago, and of some parts 

 of the southern portion of the mainland of Asia. They also con- 

 tribute to the varied population of New Guinea, where they appear 

 to merge into the taller, longer-headed, and longer-nosed Melanesians 

 proper. They show in a very marked manner some of the most 

 striking anatomical peculiarities of the Negro race, such as the 

 frizzly hair, the proportions of the limbs, especially the humero- 

 radial index, and the form of the pelvis ; but they differ in many 

 cranial and facial characters, both from the African Negroes on the 

 one hand, and the typical Oceanic Negroes, or Melanesians, on the 

 other, and thus form a very distinct and well-characterised group. 

 Wherever they are still found they are obviously holding their 

 own with difficulty, if not actually disappearing, and there is much 

 about their condition of civilisation and the situations in which 

 they occur to induce us to look upon them, as in the case of the 

 Negrillos of Central and the Bushmen of South Africa, as the 

 remains of a population which occupied the land before the incom- 

 ing of the present dominant races. 



II. The principal groups that can be arranged round the Mon- 

 golian type are as follows : 



A. The Eskimo appear to be a branch of the typical North 



