•TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 275 



Section H.— ANTHROPOLOGY. 



President of the Section: Professor A. Keith, M.D., LL.D., 



F.R.S., F.R.C.S. 



TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — ■ 



Tlie Differentiation of Mankind into Racial Types. 



For a brief half -hour I am to try and 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 explana- 

 tion — 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.' Oui- story now commences, not at the close of 

 a historical flood, but at the end of a geological epoch so distant from us 

 that we cannot 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 had taught us, the whole 

 machinery of evolution — struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, spon- 

 taneous 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 recognise the Negro at a glance by his black, shining, 

 hairless skin, his crisp hair, his flattened nose, his widely opened dark eyes, his 

 heavily moulded lips, his gleaming teeth and strong jaws. He has a carriage 

 and proportion of body of his own ; he has his peculiar quality of voice and action 

 of brain. He is, even to the unpractised eye, clearly different to the Mongolian 

 native of North-Ea.stern Asia ; the skin, the hair, the eyes, the quality of 

 brain and voice, the carriage of body and proportion of limb to body pick 

 out the Mongol as a sharply differentiated human type. Different to either of 

 these is the native of Central Europe — the Aryan or Caucasian type of man ; 

 we know him by the paleness of his skin and by his facial features — particularly 

 his narrow, prominent nose and thin lips. We are so accustomed to the pro- 

 minence of the Caucasian nose that only a jNFongol or Negro can appreciate its 

 singularity in our aryanised world. When we ask how these three tyjies — the 

 European, Chinaman, and Negi'o — came by their distinctive features, we find 

 that our evolutionary machine is defective ; the processes of natural and of 

 sexual selection will preserve and exaggerate traits of body and of mind, but they 



