May 3, 1883] 



NA TURE 



1 1 



because it is too large to bury. This is in a Wendish 

 district, where prehistoric customs are more obstinately 

 kept up than in purely German parts. Nothing could 

 more perfectly illustrate the early animistic belief in the 

 ghost turning to ghostly use the phantoms of objects laid 

 for it in the grave. Thus we have, parallel with the rude 

 material life of the Stone Age, traces of a corresponding 

 intellectual rudeness, belonging to ages when men had 

 not learnt to distinguish dreams from events, or to 

 realise the meaning of death. 



The problem of the order in which the races of men 

 were formed and attained such culture as they have is 

 obscure and perplexed enough, but it has some illu- 

 minating facts. The method by which an anthropologist 

 judges of the centre of civilisation of a race is much the 

 same as that of the botanist who looks for the district 

 where a widespread cultivated plant is found wild, as the 

 potato is in Chile, which accordingly he takes to be at or 

 near the centre of distribution ; only he has to guard 

 against the possibility of the wild plant being only a 

 cultivated variety run wild. Let us now apply this method 

 to the geography of the Negro race. The negro or 

 negroid spread over the African continent have never 

 risen high in civilisation, scarcely of themselves getting 

 beyond the barbaric stage. But on the other hand they are 

 never very low ; they are tillers of the soil, herdsmen, iron- 

 workers, and no negroid tribe has been found in a clearly 

 primitive savage state. The Bushmen, belonging to an 

 allied variety of man, are outcasts and savages by degra- 

 dation. If however we look along the map of the world 

 for the eastern branch of the black race, we find in the 

 Andaman Islands and in New Guinea and other islands 

 Negro types more or less assimilated to the African, but 

 living at lower stages of culture such as are possible in 

 the rank forest-lands of the equator. In these two dis- 

 tricts are found the only well-authenticated accounts of 

 tribes with no knowledge of any means of making fire. 

 The Andamanese have not the fire drill or any such 

 fire-making instrument, but carry burning brands about 

 with them, and if by any chance they lost their fire, 

 they could kindle it anew at their volcanoes. In an 

 outlying district of New Guinea, Mikluho-Maclay has 

 found a Papuan tribe who only carry fire-brands, and 

 do not know the fire-drill of other districts. This indi- 

 cates very low culture, whether they are representatives 

 of an originally fire'ess state, or whether by mere inert- 

 ness they have disused and forgotten so useful an art as 

 firemaking. In these regions is perhaps the Negro centre 

 whence, rising to a somewhat higher level of culture, the 

 western branch spread over Africa. Let us now look at 

 the white men from this point of view. There may be 

 remains of Stone Age Whites, but there are no certain 

 remains of White savages of a low order. We may well 

 doubt if there ever were any White savages ; it is more 

 likely that the White men were developed late in the 

 race-history of the world from ancestors already far on 

 in civilisation ; in fact, that this civilisation with its im- 

 proved supply of food, its better housing and clothing, 

 its higher intellectuality, was one main factor in the de- 

 velopment of the White type. Here, however, it must 

 be remembered that there is not a White race in the sense 

 in which there is a Carib race or an Andaman race. It 

 includes several race-types, and even the same language, 

 such as English or German, may be spoken by men as 

 blond as Danes or as dark as Sicilians. The fair-haired 

 Scandinavian type has something of the definiteness of a 

 true race ; but as one travels south there appear, not 

 well-defined sub-races, but darkening gradations of bewil- 

 dering complexity. The most reasonable attempt to solve 

 this intricate problem is Prof. Huxley's view that the 

 White race is made up of fair-whites of the Northern or 

 Scandinavian type, and dark-whites who are the result 

 of ages of mixture between the fair-whites and the darker 

 nations, though it is perhaps hardly prudent to limit these 



dark ancestors to one variety as he does. If now we 

 cannot trace the White man down to the low level 01 

 primitive savagery, neither can we assign to him the 

 great upward movement by which the barbarian passed 

 into civilisation. It is not to the Aryan of Persia 

 nor to the Semite of Syria that the art of writing 

 belongs which brought on the new era of culture. The 

 Egyptian whose hieroglyphics may be traced passing 

 from picture into alphabet had his race-allies in people of 

 North Africa, especially the Berbers of the north coast, 

 people whom no elasticity of ethnological system would 

 bring into the white race. Of the race-type of the old 

 Babylonians, who shaped likewise rude pictures into 

 wedge-phonetic signs, we know but little as yet ; at any 

 rate their speech was not Aryan, and the comparisons of 

 Lenormant and Sayce have given some ground for con- 

 necting it with the Turanian language, belonging to a 

 group of nations of whom one, the Chinese, had in remote 

 antiquity worked out a civilisation of which the develop- 

 ment of an imperfect phonetic writing formed part. If 

 the great middle move in culture was made, not by any 

 branch of the white race, but by races now represented by 

 the Egyptian and the Chinese, it is not less clear that 

 these nations came to the limit of their developing power. 

 The white races had in remote antiquity risen high in 

 barbaric culture when their contact with the darker 

 nations who invented writing opened to them new intel- 

 lectual paths. The Greeks found in the ancient Egyptian 

 theology the gods of the four elements, but they trans- 

 ferred this thought from theology to philosophy, and 

 developed from it the theory of elements and atoms 

 which is the basis of modern chemistry. They found 

 the Babylonians building terraced temples to the seven 

 planets in the order of their periods, and this conception 

 again they transferred from religion to science, founding 

 on it the doctrine of planet-spheres which grew into 

 mathematical astronomy. It may moderate our some- 

 what overweening estimate of our powers to remember 

 that the white races cannot claim to be the original 

 creators of literature and science, but from remote anti- 

 quity they began to show the combined power of acquiring 

 and developing culture which has made them dominant 

 among mankind. 



( To be continued?) 



PROFESSOR ARTHUR ROCHE 



M ARTHUR ROCHE, Professor of Mathematics 

 • and Astronomy at the Lyce"e of Montpellier, died 

 at that town on April 1 8 last, in the sixty-third year of his 

 age. M. Roche's name is most intimately associated with 

 researches on the figures of planets and comets, and the 

 cosmogonic theory of Laplace. In the report on the 

 labours of Roche made to the Academy of Sciences last 

 week by M. F. Tisserand, his memoirs were thus classi- 

 fied : — i. Various memoirs on the equilibrium of a homo- 

 geneous Huid mass subjected to certain conditions. These 

 had special reference to the beautiful researches of mathe- 

 maticians on the equilibrium of a homogeneous fluid 

 mass, animated by a movement of rotation around its 

 axis, the molecules of which are attracted according to 

 the law of Newton. M. Roche proposed to determine 

 the figure of equilibrium by taking into account a new 

 force — the attraction exerted by a centre situated at a 

 great distance. M. Roche worked out this idea with 

 great success, applying it specially to the moon, to the 

 satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, to comets, and generally 

 to the evolution of the solar system. 2. Memoirs on the 

 physical constitution of the terrestrial globe, in which he 

 came to the conclusion that the density at the centre is 

 nearly double the mean density. 3. Memoirs on the 

 internal condition of the globe, in which M. Roche was 

 led to pronounce against the complete fluidity of the 

 interior. 4. Various memoirs on the figures of comets. 



