2 92 APPENDIX. 



of kinship between the pygmy Akka and Obongo tribes 

 and the Bushman. 



The main points which appeared to former writers 

 to indicate Mongolian affinities are the yellow as opposed 

 to the black colour of the skin, the prominence of the 

 cheek bones, and the supposed obliquity of the opening 

 of the eyelids. This last peculiarity, as Fritsch (/. c. p. 

 286) has shown, is due simply to the disagreeable 

 necessity of keeping the eyelids constantly half- closed, 

 owing to the glare and, as others have pointed out, 

 the sandflies, to which these homeless savages are self-ex- 

 posed. The Swiss Professor, Schiess-Gemuscus, of Basle, 

 has similarly explained the causation of snowblindness (see 

 ' Archiv. fur Ophthalmologic,' Heft xxv. Bd. 3, p. 173), 

 by reference to the blepharospasms and conjunctivitis, 

 produced by the dryness and the glare of the upland 

 snowfield ; and I apprehend that the osseous structures 

 underlying the organs protecting the eye may be reason- 

 ably supposed to undergo sOme modification in correlation 

 with the increased demand for work, which " blepharo- 

 spasms " expresses as being thrown upon the muscular 

 structures which they support. Thus the prominent malar 

 arch and the forward ly projecting outer segments of the 

 orbit, as seen alike in the Mongolian of the treeless steppe, 

 in the Eskimo of the snow-desert, and the Bushman of the 

 sunburnt South African uplands, may receive a physio- 

 logical as opposed to a morphological explanation. But, 

 when we come further to consider the structure and 

 composition of the various segments of the orbital ring 

 in these races, we find combined with this physiologically 

 explicable similarity a very considerable morphological 

 difference. This is constituted by the conformation 

 of the nasals, which in the Bushman form invariably 

 an all but level plane between the nasal processes of 

 the maxillaries, and contribute, being narrow, but a small 

 factor to the interocular space, which, when the soft 

 parts are in situ, appears disproportionately wide as 

 compared with the same area in other races. In Mon- 



