92 Chronicles of Science. [Jan., 



the vicinity of the Ramagherry Hills, and who may really be a descen- 

 dant remnant of the Aboriginal inhabitants of India, before it was 

 overrun by the present dominant Hindu race. But the Iroolers even 

 here exist no longer in untainted purity of manner. Brahminism 

 has tinged their religious feelings, and Nagalapooram, the village in 

 which they chiefly reside, is celebrated for its temple and dancing 

 girls. The annual Sootia Poojah, or worship of the sun, is there cele- 

 brated with considerable pomp ; and anxiously do the deluded people 

 watch the rays of the sun enter the temple and glow on the uncouth 

 features of the senseless log-god in its midst. Great is their joy, and 

 happy the omen ; the worshippers being too ignorant to understand that 

 through a loop-hole cunningly constructed the sunbeams enter on this 

 one day of the year, and attributing to their insentient idol the work- 

 ing of so wonderful a miracle. 



In his paper " On the Fixity of Type," the Eev. Mr. Farrar argued 

 that from the dawn of history to the present time, an extraordinary 

 fixity of type had characterized all the recorded races and varieties of 

 mankind, and which was not accountable for by the effects of climate, 

 custom, or food. He did not, however, touch, in anything like a 

 scientific manner, the great point of how diversity of race has been 

 produced — for assuredly climate, food, and other circumstantial con- 

 ditions must be admitted to have operated, if the theory of the unity 

 of mankind is to be maintained. It is useless to adopt Mr. Beginald 

 Poole's clever argument with respect to the Egyptians for a wider 

 range, and to urge that as since the dawn of the historic period to the 

 present time, no symptoms of any change of type in the same race, 

 however slight, can be detected, therefore no change had ever pre- 

 viously occurred, without giving in an adhesion to the doctrine of a 

 multiplicity of race-origins. Nor, perhaps, can this line of argument 

 be unanswerably urged, for just as, notwithstanding between the ex- 

 tremes of the earth's wide orbit although we can get no parallax for 

 a distant twinkling star our senses assigned to it a remote but de- 

 finite distance, so the rays of the gradual change or modification of a 

 human species may come from so remote an age as to appear to our 

 limited investigations, strictly parallel and non-divergent. Suppose 

 climate an effecting cause of modification, how few races or species are 

 at at all affected by variations of one degree of temperature, and yet 

 how long a period would the supposed secular cooling of our globe 

 take to bring down the general temperature of the earth that one de- 

 gree. A hundred thousand years ? If so, and it would not be less, to 

 get the influence of one degree of cooler climate upon a human species, 

 — and how little that woidd be — it would take fifty times the whole 

 historic period. How difficult, then, to determine what is fixity of 

 type or what is slow but certain change. 



