618 The American Naturalist. [August, 
determination of these minor divisions of man,-physical char- 
acters begin to fail us. We ean only say that if the term 
Aryan is used for the western peoples generally, the Sumer- 
ians differ from them in the direction of the Semitics by their 
large oval eyes and hooked noses. On the other hand, the 
small and delicate jaws are not features of Semitic peoples. 
But the people of Persia or Iranians, hold very much this inter- 
mediate position between the two peoples. We scarcely know 
the shape of the jaws and chins of the Ninevites for they are 
never shaved. So far as the visible features go they resemble 
the Sumerians. It is on all grounds to be supposed that the 
people of Nippur and Tel-lo are the primitive Aryans of the 
Iranian or Persian race, and ancestors of the Ninevites. 
In any case it is evident that we have in these most ancient 
of civilized people, a type of man as high as any that has since 
appeared from the point of view of physical evolution. The 
extreme orthognathism; the prominence of the nose; the 
reduction of the cheek bones, the full beard; and the well 
developed extensor muscles of the leg, prove this. Homo 
sapiens caucasicus had reached his full characters on the plains 
of the Euphrates 6400 years ago. 
The relation of time and race of the oldest civilizations to 
the prehistoric peoples, is a problem which will doubtless be 
solved in time. Did the Neolithic people exist in Europe con- 
temporaneously with the Sumerians of Chaldea? The only 
light that can be thrown on the question is as follows. The 
Sumerians were not stone people, but bronze people. They 
had no knowledge of iron. No search has been made for the 
remains of animals which were their contemporaries, but 
several species are clearly represented on their sculptures. The 
most common are the lion and the ox (Bos taurus, not the 
buffalo). There is a good drawing of a gazelle in the collec- 
tion of the University of Pennsylvania. The goat and sheep 
represented on the accompanying Plate XII, are species now 
existing in Persia. The goat is near the Capra xgagrus of the 
mountains of East Persia, the ancestor of the domestic goat ; 
and the sheep is apparently the wild sheep of the same region 
Ovis vignei. So from a paleontological point of view, the Sum- 
erlans were quite modern. 
