120 



HEREDITARY CHARACTERS 



appear that the great bulk of the characters of the indi- 

 vidual, in the case of practically all organisms excepting 

 perhaps in some domesticated races, are those which have 

 been possessed by its ancestor for thousands of generations. 

 In man we have very good evidence that practically no 

 change has occurred for several thousand years even in 

 the external appearance of different races. In ancient 

 Egyptian paintings and figures, the negro was as he is now, 

 and the native of Egypt was exactly similar. That the 

 race inhabiting Egypt has not changed in characters for 

 \L several thousand years was illustrated in a very simple 

 manner upon the discovery of a figure by Mariette at Sak- 

 karah. This figure was the portrait-statue of an unknown 

 man of the Fourth Dynasty. Mariette's workmen mistook 

 it for a statue of the present Sheik-el-Beled (Mayor) of 

 Sakkarah, and the figure has in consequence .since been 

 known as the " Village Sheik " or the " Sheik-el-Beled." 

 Now the man of whom this figure is a : portrait cannot have 

 lived less than 4400 years ago, and probably not less than 

 5000. 1 Other statues and paintings tell the same story. 

 " Even to the present day the peasants or fellahs have 

 almost everywhere preserved the physiognomy of their 

 ancestors, although the upper classes have lost it by repeated 

 intermarriage with strangers." 2 



Although we have no evidence with regard to the out- 

 ward appearance of the human race in the geological periods 

 antecedent to our own, the skeletons that have been dis- 

 covered from time to time make it extremely probable that 

 no great change has taken place since the reindeer period 

 in Northern Europe. The skeletons at Cro-Magnon in the 

 valley of the Vezere are older than the reindeer age. The 

 men were apparently about 5 feet 10 inches, the women 

 5 feet 6 inches. They were dolicho-cephalic (long-headed), 



1 Adolf Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, English translation, Macniillan, 

 1894 ; Perrot and Chipicz, A History of the Art of Ancient Egypt, English 

 translation, Chapman & Hall, 1883. 



2 Maspero, Hiitoire Ancienne, p. 16. 



