THK ETHNOLOGY OF EASTERN AHA. 13 



19 dull and weak in the Chinese, more expressive m the Anamese, 

 La ii and Burmese, still more so in the Malay in which however it 

 variesmuch,beinggencral!y cloudy and sometimes sinister. In many 

 of the Indonesian races it is exceedingly brilliant, and soft or bold 

 according to the character of the people. In the lowest tribes it 

 has a great quickness and vivacity, owing to their constant exercise 

 of it A soft, delicate, pleasing, almost feminine, expression is 

 common-"^ some of the Himalayan tribes (Lepchas) and many of 

 the Asianesian from Borneo to Polynesia, 



The American Indian* have also the Turanian skull. The 

 prominent zygomatic arch has not the angularity of the M. Asiatic 

 type but is on the contrary well rounded. The prevailing type over 

 considerable regions strikingly agrees with a common Chinese form, 

 in which the face is elongated and the vertex conical. Indeed the 

 Chinese more frequently tends to the American than to the Tibetan 

 or Mongol forms. The Siamese tendency to lowness of the forehead 

 and flatness of the occiput characteristics some American tribes, 

 and niakes its appearance occasionally in most. 



From this strong general resemblance in physical constitution 

 prevailing amongst so many and so widely scattered tribes, and 

 which may be extended to the N. W. extremity of Europe and the 

 S. extremity of Africa, it follows that physical evidence alone must 

 be inadequate for the discovery of the alliances and migrations 

 of particular tribes. We have gone but a small way wnen we 

 have ascertained the boundaries of the Turanian structure. Within 

 these limits there may be tribes which have been separated from 

 an origin*! Turanian stock for as many thousand years as the Ira- 

 nian have diverged from a common Irano-Turanian stock* The 

 Timorian islanders may be nearly as distant ethnological!? from 

 the Mongols as the British islanders are. The elements of physical 

 evidence furnished by the varieties of the Turanian type are far too 

 few, too weak, and probably also too inconstant, to determine the 

 more archaic ethnic genealogy of each race. We shall find that the 

 same remark applies to sustains. Language alone presents elements 

 sufficiently numerous, subtle and constant for this purpose. The 

 possible variations in person and in customs, of families diverging 

 from the same progenitors into hundreds of isolated tribes in 

 none of which civilization becomes highly developed, bear no 

 proportion to those which are possible in language. Within the 

 drele of the same external life the mind continually works and 

 sports, in all the variety of modes produced by the multiplex or- 

 ganisms of each generation of individuals. Every idea of the past 

 presented in words becomes the object of new feelings, new combi- 

 nations and new associations in the course of the numberless times it 

 occupies the minds of individuals, in the course of a few thousands of 

 year. The transmission of sounds through some hundreds of genera- 

 tions of men, varying in their delicacy of ear and mode of articulation, 

 and subject to the frequent influences of fashion, independently of 



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