166 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
ORIGIN OF THE WHITE MAN. 
E. B, TYLOR. 
There may be remains of Stone Age whites, but there are no certain remains 
of white savages of a low order. We may well doubt if there ever were any 
white savages ; it is more likely that the white men were developed late in the 
race-history of the world from ancestors already far on in civihzation ; in fact, 
that this civihzation, with its improved supply of food, its better housing and 
clothing, its higher intellectuality, was one main factor in the development of the 
white type. Here, however, it must be remembered that there is not a white 
race in the sense in which there is a Carib race or an Andaman race. It 
includes several race-types, and even the same languages, such as English or 
German, may be spoken by men as blonde as Danes or as dark as Sicilians. The 
fair-haired Scandinavian type has something of the definiteness of a true race ; 
but as one travels south there appear, not well-defined sub-races, but darkening 
gradations of bewildering complexity. The most reasonable attempt to solve 
this intricate problem is Prof. Huxley's view that the white race is made up of 
fair whites of the Northern or Scandinavian type and dark whites, who are the 
result of ages of mixture between the fair whites and the darker nations, though 
it is perhaps hardly prudent to limit these dark ancestors to one variety, as he 
does. 
If now we can not trace the white man down to the low level of primitive 
savagery, neither can we assign to him the great upward movement by which the 
barbarian passed into civilization. It is not to the Aryan of Persia nor to the 
Semitic of Syria that the art of writing belongs which brought on the new era of 
culture. The Egyptian, whose hieroglyphics may be traced, passing from picture 
into alphabet, had his race aUies in people of North Africa, especially the Berbers 
of the north coast — people whom no elasticity of ethnological system would bring 
into the white race. Of the race-type of the old Babylonians, who shaped like- 
wise rude pictures into wedge-phonetic signs, we know but little as yet ; at any 
rate, their speech was not Aryan, and the comparisons of Lenormant and Sayce 
have given some ground for connecting it with the Turanian language, belonging 
to a group of nations of whom one, the Chinese, had in remote antiquity worked 
out a civihzation of which the development of an imperfect phonetic-writing 
formed part. If the great middle move in culture was made, not by any branch 
of the white race, but by races now represented by the Egyptian and the Chinese, 
it is not less clear that these nations came to the limit of their developing power. 
The white races had in remote antiquity risen high in barbaric culture when 
their contact with the darker nations who invented writing opened to them new 
intellectual paths. The Greeks found in the ancient Egyptian theology the gods 
of the four elements, but they transferred this thought from theology to philosophy 
