PRIMEVAL JAPANESE. 799 



enumerated a))Ove as belonging to the patrician class. There has Ikhmi 

 no evolution in this matter. The painter had as clear a conception of 

 his tj^pe ten centuries ago as he has to-day. Nothing seems more nat- 

 ural than the supposition that this higher type represents the iinally 

 dominant race of immigrants; the lower, their less civilized op])<)nents. 

 The theory which seems to tit the facts best is that the fFapanese are 

 compounded of elements fi'om Central and Southern Asia, and that 

 they received their patrician type from the former, their plebeian 

 from the latter. The Asiatic colonists arrived via Kon^a. But they 

 were neither Koreans nor Chinese. That seems certain, though the 

 evidence which proves it can not be detailed here. Chinese and 

 Koreans came from time to time in later ages; came occasionally in 

 great numbers, and were absorbed into the Japanese race, leaving on 

 it some faint traces of the amalgamation, l^ut the original colonists 

 did not set out from either China or Korea. Their ])irthplace was 

 somewhere in the north of Central Asia. As for the South- Asian 

 immigrants, they were drifted to Japan by a strange current calh^d 

 the "Black Tide*" (Kuro-shiwo), which sweeps northward from the 

 Philippines, and bending thence toward the east, touches the promon- 

 tory of Kii and Yamato before shaping its course permanently away 

 from the main island of Japan. It is true that in the chronological 

 order suggested })y eai'ly history the southern colonists succeeded the 

 northern and are supposed to have gained the mastery; whereas among 

 the Japanese, as we now see them, the supremacy of the northern 

 type appears to have been established for ages. That may b(^ 

 explained, however, by an easy hypothesis — namely, that although 

 the onset of the impetuous southerns proved at first irresistible, they 

 ultimately coalesced with the tribes they had conquered, and in the 

 end the principle of natural selection replaced th(> vanquished on theii* 

 proper plane of eminence. But this distinction, it must be observed. 

 is one of outward form rather than of moral attributes. Neither 

 history nor observation furnishes any reason for asserting that the 

 so-called "aristocratic," or Mongoloid, cast of features accompanies a 

 fuller endowment of either ph^'sical or mental qualities than the vul- 

 gar, or Malayan, cast. Numericall}' the patrician typo constitutes 

 only a small fraction of the nation, and seems to have been lacking in 

 a majority of the country's past leaders, as it is certainly lacking in a 

 majority of her present publicists, and even in the very creme do la 

 crerae of society. The male of the upper classes is not generally an 

 attractive product of nature. M(^ has neither commanding stature, 

 retinement of features, nor weight of nuiscle. On the other hand, 

 among the laboring populations, and especially among the seaside 

 folk, numbers of men are found who. though l)elow the average 

 Anglo-Saxon or Teuton in bulk, are cast in a perfectly synuuetrical 



