744 PRIMATES 
is made up, not of extreme or typical, but of more or less general- 
ised or intermediate forms, the relative numbers of which are 
continually increasing, as the long-existing isolation of nations and 
races breaks down under the ever-extending intercommunication 
characteristic of the period in which we live. 
The difficulties of framing a natural classification of Man, or 
one really representing the relationship of the various minor groups 
to each other, are well exemplified by a study of the numerous 
attempts which have been made from the time of Linneus and 
Blumenbach onwards. Even in the first step of establishing certain 
primary groups of equivalent rank there has been no accord. Thus 
four primitive types were sketched out by Linnzus—the European, 
Asiatic, African, and American. These were expanded into five 
by Blumenbach by the addition of the Malay,’ and reduced by 
Cuvier to three by the suppression of the last two. Many later 
writers have largely increased the number of these so-called primary 
divisions, but the conclusion, so often arrived at by various anthro- 
pologists, and so often abandoned for some more complex system, 
that the primitive man, whatever he may have been, has in the 
course of ages divaricated into three extreme types, represented by 
the Caucasian of Europe, the Mongolian of Asia, and the Ethiopian 
of Africa, and that all existing individuals of the species can be 
ranged around these types, or somewhere or other between them, 
seems, on the whole, to give the clearest view of the facts of the 
case. Large numbers are doubtless the descendants of direct 
crosses in varying proportions between well-established extreme 
forms; for, notwithstanding opposite views formerly held by some 
authors on this subject, there is now abundant evidence of the 
wholesale production of new races in this way. Others may be 
the descendants of the primitive stock before the strongly marked 
existing distinctions had taken place, and therefore present, though 
from a different cause from the last, equally generalised characters. 
In these cases it can only be by most carefully examining and 
balancing all characters, however minute, and finding out in what 
direction the preponderance lies, that a place can be assigned to 
them. It cannot be too often insisted on that the various groups 
of mankind, owing to their probable unity of origin, the great 
variability of individuals, and the possibility of all degrees of 
intermixture of races at remote or recent periods of the history of 
the species, have so much in common that it is extremely difficult 
to find distinctive characters capable of strict definition by which 
they may be differentiated. It is more by the preponderance of 
certain characters in a large number of members of a group, than 
by the exclusive or even constant possession of these characters 
1 The Malay of Blumenbach was a strange conglomeration of the then little 
known Australian, Papuan, and true Malay types. 
