HOMINID A 749 
north-west, and produced a modification of the physical characters, 
especially of the hair. This influence did not extend across Bass’s 
Straits into Tasmania, where, as just said, the Melanesian element 
remained in its purity. It is more strongly marked in the northern 
and central parts of Australia than on many portions of the southern 
and western coasts, where the lowness of type and more curly hair, 
sometimes closely approaching to frizzly, show a stronger retention 
of the Melanesian element. If the evidence should prove sufficiently 
strong to establish this view of the origin of the Australian natives, 
it will no longer be correct to speak of a primitive Australian, or 
even Australoid, race or type, or look for traces of the former 
existence of such a race anywhere out of their own land. Absolute 
proof of the origin of any race is, however, very difficult, if not 
impossible, to obtain, and there is nothing to exclude the possibility 
of the Australians being mainly the direct descendants of a very 
primitive human type, from which the frizzly-haired Negroes may 
be an offset. This character of hair is probably a specialisation, 
for it seems very unlikely that it was the attribute of the common 
ancestors of the human race. 
E. The fourth branch of the Negroid race consists of the 
diminutive round-headed people called Negritos, still found in a 
pure or unmixed state in the Andaman Islands, and forming a 
substratum of the population, though now greatly mixed with in- 
vading races, especially Malays, in the Philippines, and many of 
the islands of the Indo-Malayan Archipelago, and of some parts 
of the southern portion of the mainland of Asia. They also con- 
tribute to the varied population of New Guinea, where they appear 
to merge into the taller, longer-headed, and longer-nosed Melanesians 
proper. They show in a very marked manner some of the most 
striking anatomical peculiarities of the Negro race, such as the 
frizzly hair, the proportions of the limbs, especially the humero- 
radial index, and the form of the pelvis; but they differ in many 
cranial and facial characters, both from the African Negroes on the 
one hand, and the typical Oceanic Negroes, or Melanesians, on the 
other, and thus form a very distinct and well-characterised group. 
Wherever they are still found they are obviously holding their 
own with difficulty, if not actually disappearing, and there is much 
about their condition of civilisation and the situations in which 
they occur to induce us to look upon them, as in the case of the 
Negrillos of Central and the Bushmen of South Africa, as the 
remains of a population which occupied the land before the incom- 
ing of the present dominant races. 
II. The principal groups that can be arranged round the Mon- 
golian type are as follows :— 
A. The Eskimo appear to be a branch of the typical North 
