May 3l 1883] 



NA TURE 



invaders of the land, but that the two races lived and 

 were buried together, and by intermarrying gave rise to a 

 mixed population. What these early long-headed people 

 were called, or what language they spoke, is still un- 

 known. It is they to whom, on the strength of certain 

 passages in classic authors, the name of Iberian has 

 sometimes been given, and they have been identified 

 with the Basques. But no absolute correspondence has 

 been made out between them and any race past or 

 present in Spain, so that Prof. Rolleston was wise in pre- 

 ferring to call the men of the English long-barrows by 

 the local name of Silurians, and to rely on skulls for 

 defining the type, and the burial-places for marking the 

 state of civilisation, of an ancient race who thus take a 

 well-marked place in the history of our land, but of whom 

 we may possibly never learn much more. 



The mixture of races which has gone on for ages in 

 Europe makes European craniology a study of extreme 

 difficulty, but to see its clearest results we must look to 

 races long isolated and intermarrying till their skulls 

 become almost uniform. How such a type will charac- 

 terise a genuine race has been shown by Prof. Flower in 

 describing the skulls from the burial caverns of the Kai 

 Colo, the mountain people who appear to have been the 

 original inhabitants of Fiji. These mountaineers, whose 

 distinction it is to have had the narrowest skulls of any 

 known race, are repre-entatives of the frizz-haired blacks 

 so widely spread in the island groups now called after 

 them Melanesian. But the ordinary Fijian population, 

 who have lately been incorporated in the British Empire, 

 are not exactly Melanesians, nor are they Polynesians 

 like the brown Samoans and Tongans of the islands to 

 the eastward. It appears that these black and brown 

 islanders have intermixed and become the joint parents 

 of the piesent Fijian population. This is perfectly shown 

 by their skulls, whose cephalic index of breadth (71) is 

 intermediate between those of the two parent races, the 

 ancient Melanesian mountaineers (66) and the Poly- 

 nesians (83). Not only does the cephalic index of length 

 and breadth follow this rule, but it proves true in the 

 same way of the index of height, and of other measure- 

 ments of jaw, eye, and nose, which almost absolutely 

 follow the same rule of the mixed race between the two 

 parent races. The gradation is so marked, that in the 

 Fijian islands nearest the Polynesian islands the skull- 

 measurements come nearest to the Polynesian type. It 

 is I think the first time that anthropology has made so 

 close an approach to mathematical accuracy in its in- 

 ferences, and it must be admitted that when arithmetical 

 rule thus finds its way into a descriptive science, the study 

 is becoming serious. Let us now see what comparative 

 philology has to say to this Fijian question. Every 

 student who opens a Fijian grammar is apt to say, Here is 

 a Polynesian language, like Maori or Tongan ; the map 

 shows in the names of the islands plain Polynesian 

 words that a New Zealander would understand, such as 

 vanua = land, lima = five ; the Fijian not only has the 

 familiar Polynesian tabu — sacred, but he can attach 

 the Polynesian causative prefix waka to it and make the 

 verb wakatabu = to tabu a thing or make it sacred. Yet 

 this student, as he examines and analyses more deeply, is 

 driven to admit that Fijian must not be catalogued among 

 the Polynesian languages ; indeed it seems as though the 

 root and heart of it must be classed as Melanesian, 

 belonging to the black not the brown race ; nevertheless 

 the black language has absorbed not only the words but 

 the character of the brown language into an intimacy and 

 depth of mixture hardly anywhere equalled. Prof. Max 

 Miiller, in the lectures which near a quarter of a century 

 ago made a new era in the science of language in England, 

 was careful to give the much-needed caution not to trust 

 too much to language in settling questions of race. Here, 

 however, is an example how language, in cases when it is 

 possible to get its bearing clearly into view, may tell its 



story in perfect accordance with anatomy. The blended 

 parentage of the Fijians is heard in their speech as it is 

 seen in their faces. 



Not less important as a distinctive mark of race is the 

 hair. A single hair now enables the anthropologist to 

 judge in what division of the human species he will class 

 its owner; there is no mistaking a Chinese for a European, 

 or either for an African. The cross-section of this single 

 hair, examined microscopically by Pruner's method, shows 

 it circular, or oval, or reniform ; its follicle curvature 

 may be estimated by the average diameter of the curls as 

 proposed by Moseley ; its colouring matter may be esti- 

 mated by Sorby's method. There has been even a 

 systematic classification of mm published by Dr. W. 

 Miiller, of the Novara Expedition, which is primarily 

 arranged according to hair, in straight-haired races, curly- 

 haired races, &c, with a secondary division according to 

 language. Though we cannot regard such a system as 

 good, the wonder is that it should answei so well as it 

 does ; indeed nothing could prove more clearly how real 

 race-distinctions are, that a single bodily character should 

 form a basis for rationally mapping out the divisions of 

 mankind. 



It is now well understood that the causes of race-colour 

 are not so simple as Hippocrates thought when he de- 

 scribed the nomad Scythians as burned tawny by the 

 cold. But the study of anthropologists is still to notice 

 the characters which mark off the white, yellow, brown, 

 and black races, and to connect therewith the effects of 

 climate and mode of life. The analogy of fair or blond 

 skin to partial albinism is striking, and possibly points to 

 some similarity of cause. A book has even been written 

 by Dr. Poesche to explain thus the formation of the white 

 race. The fair whites, according to this author, are semi- 

 albinos, whose ancestors were once a browner race in 

 Northern Asia, but turned fair in the swampy regions of 

 the Dneiper, where men and beasts grow light in colour, 

 horses grey, the leaves of the trees pale, and all nature 

 dull and colourless. Such imaginative speculation is an 

 example to be avoided by anthropologists, and yet the 

 resemblance of blond to semi-albino skin is one which 

 when worked out by careful observation will doubtless 

 lead to discovery. A yet more striking case of the morbid 

 appearance of race-character is seen in " bronzed skin," 

 a symptom of "Addison's disease." Here the resem- 

 blance to mulatto complexion is so marked that in the 

 reports of cases it is quite a regular thing for the phy- 

 sician to mention that he asked the patient if he was of 

 negro blood. Even that well-known negro feature, the 

 comparatively light tint of palms and soles, was there, 

 though there was wanting one of the points which 

 anthropologists look to when they suspect negro an- 

 cestry, namely, the yellowness of what we charac- 

 teristically call the "white" of the eye. It is not 

 however on merely superficial comparison that this 

 analogy depends. Anthropologists unfortunately do not 

 always hear of medical work bearing on their studies, and 

 it is but lately that I learnt from Dr. Wilson Fox that 

 an interesting microscopic section of "bronzed skin" 

 was published years ago by Mr. Hutchinson in the 

 Pathological Transactions. All who compare this with 

 Kolliker's section of normal negro skin must admit the 

 extraordinary similarity of coloration, in the manner in 

 which the deep bro>n pigment cells and grains line the 

 surface of the papilla; of the dermis or true skin. I shall 

 not be charged with propounding here a theory that black 

 men are white men thus transformed, for, indeed, one 

 incident of the obscure disease in question is that the 

 patient always dies. The importance of the comparison 

 lies in its bridging over the physiological differences of 

 race, by showing that morbid action may bring about in 

 one race results more or less analogous to the normal 

 type in another. 



The differences in race-characters among mankind are 



