tremes, we find that Cuvier and Th. Waitz enumerate three races, Blumenbach and Burmeister five, Prichard and Peschel seven, Agassiz eight, Friedrich Müller and Hæckel twelve, Morton twenty-two. Burmeister, as we have seen, adds the Malays, whom Blumenbach makes a separate race, to the Caucasians; Peschel adds them to the Mongols; and the latter says of the Americans, that it were in vain to seek, even from these writers who say that they are a separate race, for any common characteristics which distinguish them from the Asiatic Mongols." Peschel further lays stress on the fact that no single characteristic is the special property of any race of men; but that, on the contrary, all the races merge into one another by imperceptible degrees. "The usual method of classifying the different races," he adds, "is very misleading; for men do not notice the frequency with which certain characteristics occur, but they seek out of many individuals that one which differs most from the individuals of other races, and make him the type.' A German, a Patagonian, a Kalmuck, and a negro no doubt differ from one another very much, but there are so many intermediate stages between them, that the transition from each separate tribe to the one next to it is not very abrupt. If you put the darkest and the lightest blue you can find next to each other you have contrasting colours; but if all the shades of blue are put together in proper order, the contrast will vanish, and the transition from the lightest to the darkest shades will become so gradual as to be unnoticed. In the sketch which I gave of Burmeister's 1 Volkerkunde, p. 431. 2 Ibid. p. 14. system I alluded to these intermediate stages between the separate races; they are not absent in any single group, and we have seen that the transition type is so strongly marked in several tribes that anthropologists cannot agree whether they belong to one race or another. "The Finns," says Waitz, "are a link between the Caucasian and the Mongolian races, and the Hindoos have often been considered to be a link between the Caucasian and the Malay race. The Tschuktschis and Yoriakes, the Eskimos and some other tribes of Western America, the form of whose skull resembles that of the Mongols, come between the Asiatics and Americans, and the Eskimos themselves, who on the Atlantic are easily distinguishable, and sharply separated from the American Indians, gradually merge into the latter on the coast of the Pacific." "So long as extremes in diversity of colour and configuration were alone considered," says Humboldt, "and the first liveliness of sensible impression was yielded to, there might have been a disposition to consider races, not as mere varieties, but as originally different kinds of men. The permanency of certain types, even amidst the most inimical operation of external, especially climatic influences, appeared to favour such an assumption, short though the time be through which historical information has come down to us. . . The greater number of the contrasts which in former times were believed to have been discovered, have been disposed of by the industrious work of Tiedemann, on the Brain of the Negro and European, and by the anatomical inquiries of Vrolik and of Weber, on the Form of the Pelvis. 1 Anthropologie, i. 241. If we look generally at the dark-skinned African nations, on which Prichard's admirable work has thrown so much light, and compare them with the races of the South Indian and West Australian Archipelagos, with the Papuans and Alfourous, we see clearly that a black skin, woolly hair, and negro-like features are by no means always conjoined. . . . The old classification of Blumenbach's into five races may be followed, or we may assume with Prichard that seven races exist: still no very distinct or natural principle of classification is recognisable in such arrangements. The extremes of configuration and colour are distinguished, without notice being taken of the tribes which cannot be included in either class." 1 As regards the different forms of skull, Aeby says: "The fact that there is no interruption in the series of normal forms, because the extremes are connected by countless intermediate forms, and further, that each normal form is only the imaginary centre of a series of individual organisms, which often equal the main series in detail, is of great importance. This continuity in the forms of skull is the more remarkable, because it is in harmony with all the other circumstances of mankind. If we break the organic connection of the extremes, they are no doubt sharply separated, and if any one, as is often the case, contrasts the negro and the European, it is easy to make splendid school pictures in most vivid colours of the different races of mankind. But then they are school pictures, and their outlines are remorselessly obliterated by the reality."" 1 Cosmos, i. 379. 2 Die Schädelformen, p. 57. In conclusion it will suffice if we mention in detail the intermediate forms of the two races whose types are farthest removed from one another, the Caucasian and the Ethiopian.' In the southern nations of the Caucasian race, says Burmeister, the colour of the skin. is brown, sometimes so dark as to resemble certain nations of the negro race, and as regards the colouring of the hair and the eyes also, the likeness to certain Ethiopian peoples is unmistakeable. The Berbers of Nubia in the upper valley of the Nile show this transition most plainly. They have a good figure, an oval face, a hooked nose, like the Caucasians; the lips are thick but not puffed out, the hair crisp and curly but not woolly as with the negroes; the colour is bronze, something between the ebony black of the true negro and the olive shade of the Egyptians. The inhabitants of the Nuba in Kordofan are even more like the negroes; their colour is not quite so dark, but it is coppery ; their features have something negro-like in them, but they are more regular; the nose is smaller than that of the Europeans, but it is less flat than that of the negroes; the lips are not so thick and the cheek-bones not so projecting; the hair is woolly with some, but with most it resembles that of the Europeans, only it is thicker and always curly. A few of the Bedouin tribes between the Nile and the Red Sea are dark brown, and in some cases almost black; the hair is black and curly although not woolly the whole form of body is more like Europeans than negroes. All these nations are included in the Caucasian race. In the Ethiopian negroes the intensity of colour varies 1 Cf. Waitz, Anthropologie, i. 234. according to the peoples and individuals, very few have a deep black skin. Flat noses, thick lips, and projecting jaws are the rule no doubt, but there are frequent exceptions, and we often find European physiognomies in the middle of the African type. Sometimes this may proceed from an intermixture with Europeans; but much more often this is out of the question, and these instances must be examples of original transitional forms to the Caucasian race. Some tribes are deep black, but their physiognomies are not at all negro-like, their features being rather European or Indian. The woolly hair is the most constant characteristic of the negro race, but among the Fellahs, for example, it is frequently not found. The Kaffirs have the dark colour and woolly hair in common with the negroes, but in their features and bodily shape they differ from them, and show a surprising likeness to Europeans, although geographically they are farther from the Caucasian than from the negro race. The Hottentots resemble the negroes in having woolly hair, flat noses, and thick lips, but they differ from them in having a yellow coloured skin, projecting cheek-bones and narrow eyes; and in this respect and in the form of their skull they resemble the Chinese, that is, the Mongolian type. "There is, perhaps, not one tribe," says Prichard, "in which all the characters ascribed to the negro are found in the highest degree, and in general they are distributed to different races in all manners of ways, and combined in each instance with more or fewer of the characters belonging to the European or the Asiatic." The alleged persistency of the negro type," says Waitz, 66 1 |