ASSIMILATIVE COLOURATION.  . 403 
our earliest ancestors; not altogether what we mean by “ primi- 
tive man,” but rather of the creature that gradually became less 
simian, and more and more human. Of this missing link we 
know absolutely nothing as to the colour of its—or perhaps we 
should say his—skin; neither do we of the colour of fossil Apes. © 
As Dr. Buchner has remarked: “'The Orang or Orang-outan 
which inhabits the Asiatic Archipelago is of a yellowish red colour 
and brachycephalous, or short-headed, like the Malays; whilst the 
Chimpanzee and the Gorilla, both of which are indigenous to 
Africa, are black and dolichocephalous, or long-headed, like the 
Negroes.” * There is also much truth in the statement of 
Winwood Reade, that many ethnologists discuss the question as 
though the original colour of mankind was white; “but the 
naked primeval men were probably dark, for white is a colour 
injurious to wild animals, and seldom if ever found in the fauna 
of the forest.’’+ Of fossil Apes we know more or less of the 
anatomical structure, but our conclusions as to colour can only 
be equivalent to our pronouncing the colour of a prehistoric man 
whose skull was found in Africa as black ; of one found in Kurope 
as necessarily white; or another discovered in America as red. 
That secret belongs entirely to the past, and its solution can 
only be suggested by induction. As De Quatrefages has re- 
marked: ‘‘ The first men who peopled the centre of human 
appearance must at first have differed from each other only in 
individual features.” { Their colour would have been uniform, 
either derived from their more brutish ancestors, or possibly, as 
their habits became less arboreal, a more assimilative colouration 
may have ensued to the soil on which they walked. Then, as 
migrations followed and the more plastic forms of these last 
evoluted children of nature reached centres of different geological 
conditions, we might imagine that again assimilative colouration 
played a part; and these incidents of early wanderings and colour 
absorption of the long, long ago, when the species was still clay 
in the hands of Nature,§ the potter, gradually became permanent, 
* ‘Man—Present, Past, Future,’ p. 125. With reference to colour, the 
observation had also occurred to Agassiz. (‘Essay on Classification, p. 182.) 
+ ‘African Sketch Book,’ vol. ii. p. 528. 
j ‘The Human Species,’ p. 244. 
§ We use this term as defined by J. 8. Mill: ‘* Nature means the sum of 
