That there is a real connexion between the colour of races and the climate they belong to, seems most likely from the so-called black peoples. Ancient writers were satisfied to account for the colour of the Æthiopians by saying that the sun had burnt them black, and though modern anthropologists would not settle the question in this off-hand way, yet the map of the world shows that this darkest race-type is principally found in a tropical climate. The main line of black races stretches along the hot and fertile regions of the equator, from Guinea in West Africa to that great island of the Eastern Archipelago, which has its name of New Guinea from its negro-like natives. In a former geological period an equatorial continent (to which Sclater has given the name of Lemuria) may even have stretched across from Africa to the far East, uniting these now separate lands. The attention of anthropologists has been particularly attracted by a line of islands in the Sea of Bengal, the Andamans, which might have been part of this former continent, and were found inhabited by a scanty population of rude and childlike savages. These Mincopis (Fig. 23) are small in stature (the men under five feet), with skin of blackness, and hair very flat in section and frizzled, which from their habit of shaving their heads must be imagined by the reader. But while in these points resembling the African negro, they are unlike him in having skulls not narrow, but broad and rounded, nor have they lips so full, a nose so wide, or jaws so projecting as his. It has occurred to anatomists, and the opinion has been strengthened by Flower’s study of their skulls, that the Andaman tribes may be a remnant of a very early human stock, perhaps the best representatives of the primitive negro type which has since altered in various points in its spread over its wide district of the world. The African negro race, with its special marks of narrow skull, projecting jaws, black-brown skin, woolly hair, flattened nose, full and out-turned lips, has already been here described (see pages 61 to 67). Its type perhaps shows itself most perfectly in the nations near the equator, as in Guinea, but it spreads far and wide over the continent, shading off by crossing with lighter coloured races on its borders, such as the Berbers in the north, and the Arabs on the east coast. As the race spreads southward into Congo and the Kafir regions, there is noticed a less full negro complexion and feature, looking as though migration from the central region into new climates had somewhat modified the type. In this respect the small-grown Hottentot-Bushman tribes of South Africa (see Figs. 8, 12 c) are most remarkable, for while keeping much negro character in the narrow skull, frizzy hair, and cast of features, their skin is of a lighter tint of brownish-yellow. There is nothing to suggest that this came by crossing the negro type with a fairer race, indeed there is no evidence of such a race to cross with. If the Bushman is a special modification of the Negro, then this is an excellent case of the transformation of races when placed under new conditions. To return now to Southern Asia, there are found in the Malay Peninsula and the Philippines scanty forest-tribes apparently allied to the Andamaners and classed under the general term Negritos (i.e. “little blacks”), seeming to belong to a race once widely spread over this part of the world, whose remnants have been driven by stronger new come races to find refuge in the mountains. Fig. 24, represents one of them, an Aheta from the island of Luzon. Lastly come the wide-spread and complicated varieties of the eastern negro race in the region known as Melanesia, the “black islands,” extending from New Guinea to Fiji. The group of various islanders (Fig. 25) belonging to Bishop Patteson’s mission, shows plainly the resemblance to the African negro, though with some marked points of difference, as in the brows being more strongly ridged, and the nose being more prominent, even aquiline—a striking contrast to the African. The Melanesians about New Guinea are called Papuas from their woolly hair (Malay papuwah = frizzed), which is often grown into enormous mops. The great variety of colour in Melanesia, from the full brown-black down to chocolate or nut-brown, shows that there has been much crossing with lighter populations. Such mixture is evident in the coast-people of Fiji, where the dark Melanesian race is indeed predominant, but crossed with the lighter Polynesian race to which much of the language and civilization of the islands belongs. Lastly, the Tasmanians were a distant outlying population belonging to the eastern blacks.

In Australia, that vast island-continent, whose plants and animals are not those of Asia, but seem as it were survivors from a long-past period of the earth’s history, there appears a thin population of roaming savages, strongly distinct from the blacker races of New Guinea at the north, and Tasmania at the south. The Australians, with skin of dark chocolate-colour, may be taken as a special type of the brown races of man. While their skull is narrow and prognathous like the negro’s, it differs from it in special points which have been already mentioned (page 60), and has, indeed, peculiarities which distinguish it very certainly from that of other races. In the portraits of Australians, Figs. 26, 27, 28, there may be noticed the heavy brows and projecting jaws, the wide but not flat nose, the full lips, and the curly but not woolly black hair. Looking at the map of the world to see where brown races next appear, good authorities define one on the continent of India. There the hill-tribes present the type of the old dwellers in south and central India before the conquest by the Aryan Hindus, and its purest form appears in tribes hardly tilling the soil, but living a wild life in the jungle, while the great mass, more mixed in race with the Hindus, under whose influence they have been for ages, now form the great Dravidian nations of the south, such as the Tamil and Telugu. Fig. 29 represents one of the ruder Dravidians, from the Travancore forests. Farther west, it has been thought that a brown race may be distinguished in Africa, taking in Nubian tribes and less distinctly traceable in the Berbers of Algiers and Tunis. If so, to this race the ancient Egyptians would seem mainly to belong, though mixed with Asiatics, who from remote antiquity came in over the Syrian border. The Egyptian drawings of themselves (as in Chaps. IX. to XI.) require the eyes to be put in profile and the body coloured reddish-brown to represent the race to us. None felt more strongly than the Egyptian of ancient Thebes, that among the chief distinctions between the races of mankind were the complexion and feature which separated him from the Æthiopian on the one hand, and the Assyrian or Israelite on the other.

Turning to another district of the world, the Mongoloid type of man has its best marked representatives on the vast steppes of northern Asia. Their skin is brownish-yellow, their hair of the head black, coarse, and long, but face-hair scanty. Their skull is characterized by breadth, projection of cheek-bones, and forward position of the outer edge of the orbits, which, as well as the slightness of brow-ridges, the slanting aperture of the eyes, and the snub-nose, are observable in Figs. 30 and 31, and in Fig. 12 d. The Mongoloid race is immense in range and numbers. The great nations of south-east Asia show their connexion with it in the familiar complexion and features of the Chinese and Japanese. Figs. 32, 33, 34 are portraits from Siam, Cochin-China, and Corea. In his wide migrations over the world, the Mongoloid, through change of climate and life, and still farther by intermarriage with other races, loses more and more of his special points. It is so in the South-east, where in China and Japan the characteristic breadth of skull is lessened. In Europe, where from remotest antiquity hordes of Tatar race have poured in, their descendants have often preserved in their languages, such as Hungarian and Finnish, clearer traces of their Asiatic home than can be made out in their present types of complexion and feature. Yet the Finns, Figs. 35 and 36, have not lost the race-differences which mark them off from the Swedes among whom they dwell, and the stunted Lapps show some points of likeness to their Siberian kinsfolk, who wander like them with their reindeer on the limits of the Arctic regions.

In pursuing beyond this point the examination of the races of the world, the problem becomes more obscure. On the Malay peninsula, at the extreme south-east corner of Asia, appear the first members of the Malay race, seemingly a distant branch of the Mongoloid, which spreads over Sumatra, Java, and other islands of the Eastern Archipelago. Figs. 37 and 38 give portraits of the more civilised Malays, while Fig. 39 shows the Dayaks of Borneo, who represent the race in a wilder and perhaps less mixed state. From the Malay Archipelago there stretch into the Pacific the island ranges first of Micronesia and then of Polynesia, till we reach Easter Island to the east and New Zealand to the south. The Micronesians and Polynesians show connexion with the Malays in language, and more or less in bodily make. But they are not Malays proper, and there are seen among them high faces, narrow noses, and small mouths which remind us of the European face, as in the Micronesian, Fig. 40, who stands here to represent this varied group of peoples. The Maoris are still further from being pure Malays, as is seen by their more curly hair, often prominent and even aquiline noses. It seems likely that an Asiatic race closely allied to Malays may have spread over the South Sea Islands, altering their special type by crossing with the dark Melanesians, so that now the populations of different island groups often vary much in appearance. This race of sailors even found their way to Madagascar, where their descendants have more or less blended with a population from the continent of Africa.

Turning now to the double continent of America, we find in this New World a problem of race remarkably different from that of the Old World. The traveller who should cross the earth from Nova Zemlya to the Cape of Good Hope or Van Diemen’s Land would find in its various climates various strongly-marked kinds of men, white, yellow, brown, and black. But if Columbus had surveyed America from the Arctic to the Antarctic regions, he would have found no such extreme unlikeness in the inhabitants. Apart from the Europeans and Africans who have poured in since the fifteenth century, the native Americans in general might be, as has often been said, of one race. Not that they are all alike, but their differences in stature, form of skull, feature, and complexion, though considerable, seem variations of a secondary kind. It is not as if several races had formed each its proper type in its proper region, but as if the country had been peopled by migrating tribes of a ready-made race, who had only to spread and acclimatise themselves over both tropical and temperate zones, much as the European horses have done since the time of Columbus, and less perfectly the white men themselves. The race to which most anthropologists refer the native Americans is the Mongoloid of East Asia, who are capable of accommodating themselves to the extremest climates, and who by the form of skull, the light-brown skin, straight black hair, and black eyes, show considerable agreement with the American tribes. Figs. 41 and 42 represent the wild hunting-tribes of North America in one of the finest forms now existing, the Colorado Indians, while in Fig. 43 the Cauixana Indians may stand as examples of the rude and sluggish forest-men of Brazil. While tribes of America and Asia may thus be of one original stock, we must look cautiously at theories as to the ocean and island routes by which Asiatics may have migrated to people the New World. It is probable that man had appeared there, as in the Old World, in an earlier geological period than the present, so that the first kinship between the Mongols and the North American Indians may go back to a time when there was no ocean between them. What looks like later communication between the two continents, is that the stunted Eskimo with their narrow roof-topped skulls may be a branch of the Japanese stock, while there are signs of the comparatively civilized Mexicans and Peruvians having in some way received arts and ideas from Asiatic nations.

We come last to the white men, whose nations have all through history been growing more and more dominant intellectually, morally, and politically on the earth. Though commonly spoken of as one variety of mankind, it is plain that they are not a single uniform race, but a varied and mixed population. It is a step toward classing them to separate them into two great divisions, the dark-whites and fair-whites (melanochroi, xanthochroi). Ancient portraits have come down to us of the dark-white nations, as Assyrians, Phœnicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans; and when beside these are placed moderns such as the Andalusians, and the dark Welshmen or Bretons, and people from the Caucasus, it will be evident that the resemblance running through all these can only be in broad and general characters. They have a dusky or brownish-white skin, black or deep brown eyes, black hair, mostly wavy or curly; their skulls vary much in proportions, though seldom extremely broad or narrow, while the profile is upright, the nose straight or aquiline, the lips less full than in other races. Rather for form’s sake than for a real type of the dark-whites, a group of Georgians are shown in Fig. 44. Opposite them Fig. 45, a group of Swedes, somewhat better represents the fair-whites, whose transparent skin, flaxen hair, and blue eyes may be seen as well, though not as often, in England as in Scandinavia or North Germany. The earliest recorded appearance of fair-whites may be in the paintings where Egyptian artists represent with yellowish-white skin and blue eyes certain natives of North Africa, a district where remnants of blonde tribes are still known. These fair Libyans, as well as the fair red-haired people who appear about Syria, and are known to us as forming a type among the Jews, may perhaps be connected in race with the fair nations who were already settled over the north of Europe when the classic writers begin to give accounts of its barbarous inhabitants, from the Goths northward to the dwellers in Thule. The intermarriage of the dark and fair varieties which has gone on since these early times, has resulted in numberless varieties of brown-haired people, between fair and dark in complexion. But as to the origin and first home of the fair and dark races themselves, it is hard to form an opinion. Language does much toward tracing the early history of the white nations, but it does not clear up the difficulty of separating fair-whites from dark-whites. Both sorts have been living united by national language, as at this day German is spoken by the fair Hanoverian and the darker Austrian. Among Keltic people, the Scotch Highlanders often remind us of the tall red-haired Gauls described in classical history, but there are also passages which prove that smaller darker Kelts like the modern Welsh and Bretons existed then as well. As a help in clearing up this problem, which so affects our own ancestry, Huxley suggests that the fair-whites were the original stock, and that these crossing with the brown races of the far south may have given rise to the various kinds of dark-whites. However this may be, such mixture of the white and brown races seems indeed to have largely formed the population of countries where they meet. The Moors of North Africa, and many so-called Arabs who are darker than white men, may be thus accounted for. It is thus that in India millions who speak Hindu languages show by their tint that their race is mixed between that of the Aryan conquerors of the land and its darker indigenes. An instructive instance of this very combination is to be seen in the Gypsies, low-caste wanderers who found their way from India and spread over Europe not many centuries since. Fig. 46, a Gypsy woman from Wallachia, is a favourable type of these latest incomers from the East, whose broken-down Hindu dialect shows that part of their ancestry comes from our Aryan forefathers, while their complexion, swarthiest in the population of our country, marks also descent belonging to a darker zone of the human species.

Thus to map out the nations of the world among a few main varieties of man, and their combinations, is, in spite of its difficulty and uncertainty, a profitable task. But to account for the origin of these great primary varieties or races themselves, and exactly to assign to them their earliest homes, cannot be usefully attempted in the present scantiness of evidence. If man’s first appearance was in a geological period when the distribution of land and sea and the climates of the earth were not as now, then on both sides of the globe, outside the present tropical zones, there were regions whose warmth and luxuriant vegetation would have favoured man’s life with least need of civilized arts, and whence successive waves of population may have spread over cooler climates. It may perhaps be reasonable to imagine as latest-formed the white race of the temperate region, least able to bear extreme heat or live without the appliances of culture, but gifted with the powers of knowing and ruling which give them sway over the world.