LEMURS, MONKEYS, AND MAN 373 



much less in the female than in the males). Something like this 

 hypothetical sketch can be seen in the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, 

 who, if we had a Government that cared two straws for unpro- 

 ductive science, would be most carefully preserved and nurtured 

 as an object lesson. 



Homo sapiens caucasicus. The White Man 

 This is the commonest mammal in the British Islands at the 

 present day, with the doubtful exception of the long-tailed field- 

 mouse. It is, perhaps, simplest to style this sub-species in the 

 vernacular the " White man," in contrast to the Yellow man 

 {^Homo sapiens mongolicus), and the Black man {Homo sapiens athiopi- 

 cus). But the more primitive types of this sub-species at the 

 present day (and, no doubt, in past times) tend very often to 

 possess a dusky or brownish-yellow skin, though much of their 

 deepening colour is, no doubt, due to ancient intermixture with 

 the Ethiopian race. In some respects the lowest types, fossil 

 and existing, of Caucasic man come nearest to the primal stock 

 of humanity, and are less differentiated from the ape than is the 

 Negro or Mongolian. On the other hand, its highest examples 

 have almost left the class of Mammalia to found a new class of 

 Demigods. The sub-specific name caucasicus, or Caucasian, has 

 been much contested, but inasmuch as this type of humanity 

 early attained a very typical form in the races about the Caucasus, 

 and as europaus would not comprise a race which dwells also 

 (apart from recent migrations) in Asia and Africa, caucasicus 

 is, perhaps, the least inapt designation, as it represents the locality 

 in which the white man probably first became emphatically a 

 white man. 



Britain has been inhabited by man since the early part of 

 the Pleistocene period, when he seems to have entered England 

 from Belgium or France, and to have spread northwards and 

 north-westwards into Scotland and Ireland. The Glacial con- 

 ditions which afflicted Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Northern 

 England during the Pleistocene no doubt much interfered with 

 early man's prosperity and peregrinations in these parts, and 



