THE DIFFERENTIATION OF MANKIND INTO RACIAL 
TYPES. 
By Pror. AgTHuR KeritH, M. D., LL. D., F. R. S. 
For a brief half hour I am to try to engage your attention on a 
matter which has excited the interest of thoughtful minds from 
ancient times—the problem of how mankind has been demarcated 
into types so diverse as the Negro, the Mongol, and the Caucasian or 
European. For many a day the Mosaic explanation—the Tower of 
Babel theory—was regarded as a sufficient solution of this difficult 
problem. In these times most of us have adopted an explanation 
which differs in many respects from that put forward in the Book 
of Genesis; Noah disappears from our theory and is replaced in the 
dim distance of time by a “common ancestral stock.” Our story 
now commences not at the close of an historical flood but at the 
end of a geological epoch so distant from us that we can not compute 
its date with any degree of accuracy. Shem, Ham, and Japheth, 
the reputed ancestors of the three great racial stocks of modern 
times—the white, black, and yellow distinctive types of mankind— 
have also disappeared from our speculations; we no longer look out 
on the world and believe that the patterns which stud the variegated 
carpet of humanity were all woven at the same time; some of the 
patterns, we believe, are of ancient date and have retained many of 
the features which marked the “common ancestral” design; others 
are of more recent date, having the ancient pattern altered in many 
of its details. We have called in, as Darwin has taught us, the whole 
machinery of evolution—struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, 
spontaneous origin of structural variations, the inheritance of such 
variations—as the loom by which nature fashions her biological 
patterns. We have replaced the creative finger by the evolutionary 
machine, but no one is more conscious of the limitations of that 
machine than the student of human races. We are all familiar with 
the features of that racial human type which clusters round the 
heart of Africa; we recognize the Negro at a glance by his black, 
shining, hairless skin, his crisp hair, his flattened nose, his widely 
opened dark eyes, his heavily molded lips, his gleaming teeth and 
1 Opening address by the president of the anthropology section of the British Associa-, 
tion Meeting at Bournemouth. Reprinted by permission from Nature, vol. 104, No. 2611, 
Noy. 138, 1919. 
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