BIMANA. 



these that the naturalist is immediately concerned ; nor yet with the 

 alterations in tribes which a change of food, the adoption of new man- 

 ners, or an improvement of country by draining morasses, and cultivat- 

 ing its surface, will produce, but which affect not their predominant 

 physical peculiarities ;* nor is it with accidental variations in stature or 

 complexion : but with the great stocks, or types of form, to which the 

 multitudinous branches of mankind are respectively referable, and under 

 which the various people of the globe are to be respectively grouped and 

 associated. 



Great are the difficulties in the way. It is impossible to trace the 

 progress of the human swarms, which, in remote antiquity, have succes- 

 sively advanced, from various points, spreading as they have proceeded, 

 and mingling with other nations. History throws no light on the sub- 

 ject ; nor, indeed, are records extant, affording the least notice of what 

 must evidently have been some of the most important migrations ever 

 undertaken by our species : such as the red colonization of America 

 (to say nothing of the revolutions of states, which, at some remote epoch, 

 appear to have taken place on that great theatre) ; the colonization of 

 Australia, New Zealand, and the multitudinous islands which bespangle 

 the Southern Ocean, the colonization of Europe and of our own island 

 occupied, ere Greece and Rome "had writ their annals," by races 

 whose origin and progress are buried in oblivion. Let it also be remem- 

 bered, that the migrations of Man are, for the most part, not single acts, 

 performed by one tribe, and, so to speak, finished at once ; but they have 

 generally been like the waves of the advancing tide the way once open, 

 swarm has followed swarm, the movement has been general, and years 

 have passed, till, at length, the flood has either ceased to roll on, or has 

 taken some new direction. Meanwhile the invaders have become amal- 

 gamated with the more ancient possessors of the soil, and their com- 

 mingled descendants again with other invaders, in their turn. Most na- 

 tions, besides, if even relics of their early history be by chance preserved, 

 have fondly claimed for themselves a romantic or heroic origin a descent 

 from gods, or god-like men have blended facts with fables, between which 

 it is not a little difficult to separate, and have assigned the most ex- 

 travagant antiquity to their commencement. Hence, then, the difficulty 

 of forming a clear digest of the subject, and of tracing the branches and 

 offsets to their primitive stocks ; hence the uncertainty which attends the 

 most plausible hypotheses. 



* In savage countries the chiefs are, for the most part, readily distinguishable from the lower 

 classes, by the superiority of their stature ; owing, most probably, to an exemption from depressing 

 toil, and to a better supply of food. The stunted, meagre, Bushmen of Southern Africa are exam- 

 ples of the deteriorating effects of want, fear, and innutritious and scanty food : the relics of a 

 Hottentot race, their physical nature seems to have succumbed beneath the pressure of a series of ad- 

 verse circumstances, but its zoological characters remain unaffected. 



