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RACE HEAD-FORMS AND THEIR EXPRESSION BY 

 MEASUREMENTS. 



BY DANIEL WILSON, LL.D. 



PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, TORONTO. 



The significance of " race" as an element in the progress of diverse 

 nationalities has acquired an importance in modern times, wholly 

 unknown to early historians. The origin of races is still one of the 

 mysteries of science, hut the influences arising from the diversity of 

 ethnical character were already in operation at the very dawn of history. 

 Nearly two thousand years before the Christian era, the monuments of 

 Egypt recorded the relations of a dominant fair, or, as conventionally 

 coloured, a red-skinned orthognathic race, with one of the very same 

 Negro type as that which has been the servant of servants through all 

 later centuries. Thus remote in the period to which such well defined 

 diversities can be traced : their significance has been assumed by some 

 as the index of a wholly independent origin; and hence the term 

 " race" has come to be used necessarily with definitions or limitations. 

 It may suffice here to borrow those of an author whose writings will 

 furnish subject for some comment in the following pages. 



" Though I have frequently found it convenient to use the word 

 race," says Mr. Luke Owen Pike, in his English and their Oriyin, " I 

 wish it to be understood that I do not commit myself to any theory 

 about the first origin of the different races of mankind, I simply 

 recognize the fact that there are various peoples possessing common 

 characteristics in which they differ from other peoples, and which they 

 hand down to their descendants with little change." Thus far it may 

 be assumed that all are agreed. No one, moreover, doubts that those 

 differences are moral as well as physical; and not only influence the 

 dealings of Englishmen with Hindoos, Maories, Caffres, and Red In- 

 dians, but perpetuate the divisions of their common nationality, as 

 English, Welsh, Scots and Irish. On this continent, indeed, the 

 interbleuding of such minuter ethnical divisions is more rapid ; yet 

 even here the term " Anglo-Saxon," so familiarly used, applies rather 

 to a common language than a homogeneous race. 



