vii.] METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 155 



all, the Papuan islands ; but the Negritos who inhabit 

 these islands are strikingly different from the Austra- 

 lians. Again, the differences between the Mongolians 

 and the Xanthochroi are out of all proportion greater 

 than those between the Faunae and Florae of Central and- 

 Eastern Asia. But whatever the difficulties in the 

 way of the detailed application of this comparison of 

 the distribution of men with that of animals, it is well 

 worthy of being borne in mind, and carried as far as it 

 will go. 



Apart from all speculation, a very curious fact regard- 

 ing the distribution of the persistent modifications of 

 mankind becomes apparent on inspecting an Ethnolo- 

 gical chart, projected in such a manner that the Pacific 

 Ocean occupies its centre. Such a chart exhibits an 

 Australian area occupied by dark smooth-haired people, 

 separated by an incomplete inner zone of dark woolly- 

 haired Negritos and Negroes, from an outer zone of com- 

 paratively pale and smooth-haired men, occupying the 

 Americas, and nearly all Asia and North Africa. 



Such is a brief sketch of the characters and distribu- 

 tion of the persistent modifications, or stocks, of man- 

 kind at the present day. If we seek for direct evidence 

 of how long this state of things has lasted, we shall 

 find little enough, and that little far from satisfactory. 

 Of the eleven different stocks enumerated, seven have 

 been known to us for less than 400 years ; and of these 

 seven not one possessed a fragment of written history at 

 the time it came into contact with European civilization. 

 The other four the Negroes, Mongolians, Xanthochroi, 

 and Melanochroi have always existed in some of the 

 localities in which they are now found, nor do the negroes 

 ever seem to have voluntarily travelled beyond the limits 

 of their present area. But ancient history is in a great 



