II. The Dispersive Elements.
These have been of the utmost moment in the history of the species, and a controlling factor in the records of every people. They are derived from two quite different impulses in human nature; the one, a natural propensity to roam, the other, a predisposition to contest.
Both have been favored by the ability of the species to adapt itself to its surroundings, far surpassing that of any other animal. There is no zone and no altitude offering the necessary food supplies that man does not inhabit. The cat, with its traditional “nine lives,” perishes in the upper Andes, where men live in populous cities. No one breed of dogs can follow man to all latitudes. His powers of locomotion are equally surprising. He can walk the swift horse to death, and his steady and tireless gait will in the long-run leave every competitor behind. An Indian will track a deer for days and capture it through its utter fatigue. A Tebu thinks little of passing three days under the sun of the Sahara without drinking. Such powers as these endow man with the highest migratory faculties of any animal, and give rise to or have been developed from
1. The Migratory Instincts.
Many species of animals, especially birds, change their habitat with the seasons, the object usually being to obtain a better food supply. So do most hunting and fishing tribes, and for the same reason. Often these periodical journeys extend hundred of miles and embrace the whole tribe.
This must also have been the case with primeval man when he occupied the world in “palæolithic” time. His home was along the shores of seas and the banks of streams. Up and down these natural highways he pursued his wanderings, until he had extended his roamings over most of the habitable land.
What prompted him and all savage tribes is not always the search for food. The desire for a more genial climate, the pressure of foes, and often mere causeless restlessness, act as motive forces in the movements of an unstable population. Certain peoples, as the Gypsies, seem endowed with an hereditary instinct for vagabondage. The nomadic hordes of the Asiatic steppes and the wastes of the Sahara transmit a restlessness to their descendants which in itself is an obstacle to a sedentary life.
Such vagrant tribes became the colporteurs and commercial travellers of early society. They invented means or transportation, and conveyed the products of one region to another. Only of late have we learned to appreciate the wide extent of pre-historic commerce. Long before Abraham settled in Ur of the Chaldees (say 2000 B. C.), a well-travelled commercial road stretched from the cities of Mesopotamia, through Egypt to the Pillars of Hercules, and thence into Europe.[34] When Hendrick Hudson sailed into the bay of New York, the commercial relations of the tribes who lived on its shores had already extended to the coast of the Pacific.[35]
These lines of early traffic were also the lines of the migrations of nations. They were fixed by the physical geography of regions, and have rightly attracted the careful attention of ethnographers. Along them, nation has blended into nation, race fused with race. The conviction that early man was not sedentary, but mobile, by nature a migratory species, wandering widely over the face of the earth, is one which has been brought home to the ethnologist by the science of prehistoric archæology, and it is full of significance.
2. The Combative Instinct.
The philosopher Hobbes taught that the natural condition of man in society is one of perpetual warfare with his neighbors. This grim theory is sadly attested by a study of savage life. The wretched Fuegians, the miserable Australians, with really nothing worth living for, let alone dying for, fall to cutting each other’s throats the moment that tribe encounters tribe. So it has been in all ages, so it has been in all stages of culture. The warrior, the hero, is the one who wins the hearts of women by his fame, and the devotion of men by his prowess. Civilization helps not at all. In no century of the world’s history have such destructive battles been fought as in the nineteenth; at no former period have the powers of the earth collected such gigantic armies and navies as to-day.
This love of combat at once separates and unites nations. To destroy the common foe, the bonds of national or tribal unity are drawn the tighter; and the aversion to the enemy tends to the preservation of the ethnic type.
In spite of the countless miseries which follow in its train, war has probably been the highest stimulus to racial progress. It is the most potent excitant known of all the faculties. The intense instinct of self-preservation will prompt to an intellectual energy which nothing else can awake. The grandest works of imagination, the immortal outbursts of the poets, from Homer to Whitman, have been under the stimulus of the war-cry ringing in their ears.
The world-conquerors and the holy wars, Alexander and Napoleon, the Crusades and the Mohammedan invasions, have been landmarks in history, a destruction of the effete, an introduction of the new and the viable. Guizot’s bold statement that in the decisive battles of the world it has been, not the strongest battalions, but the truest idea which has conquered, may be a profound ethnologic truth. Certain it is that in weighing the psychical elements of man’s nature and their influence on the past history of the species, we must assign to his combative instincts a most prominent place as stimulants, and we must recognize, amid all the miseries which they have brought upon him, the part they have played in his development. That they have always resulted in promoting the “survival of the fittest,” it is hard to believe, and there is much to make us doubt; but that a great deal of the unfit has thus been destroyed, we may reasonably accept.
What has been true always, is true to-day. It is force, might, which forever exercises “the right of eminent domain;” and this principle is as necessary as it is indestructible. Proudhon was logical, when, in his treatise on War and Peace, he placed war and the duty of waging war at the basis of all society, and defended it as the necessary condition of civilization, inasmuch as it alone is the highest form of judicial action, the last appeal of the oppressed. Never, we may be sure, will the human species be ready or willing to forego this, the greatest of all their privileges.
LECTURE III.
THE BEGINNINGS AND SUBDIVISIONS OF RACES.
Contents.—The origin of Man. Theories of monogenism and polygenism; of evolution; heterogenesis. Identities point to one origin. Birthplace of the species. The oldest human relics. Remains of the highest apes. Question of climate. Negative arguments. Darwin’s belief that the species originated in Africa confirmed; but with modifications. Quaternary geography of Europe and Africa. Northern Africa united with Southern Europe. Former shore lines. The Sahara Sea. The quaternary continents of “Eurafrica,” and “Austafrica.” Relics of man in them. Man in pre-glacial times. The Glacial Age. Effect on man. Scheme of geologic time during the Age of Man. His development into races. Approximate date of this. Localities where it occurred. The “areas of characterization.” Relations of continents to races. Theory of Linnaeus; of modern ethnography. Classification of races. General ethnographic scheme. Sub-divisions of races; branches; stocks; groups; peoples; tribes; nations. Other terms; ethnos and ethnic; culture; civilization. Stadia of culture.
In the rapid survey contained in the previous lectures you have seen in how many points the races differ. No wonder that the question has often been seriously mooted by scientific men, Could they all have been derived from one common ancestral stock? This is the old debate about “the unity of the human race,” still surviving under the more learned terms of monogenism or polygenism.
As to that other question, whether man came into being as such by a gradual development, evolution, or transformation, from some lower mammal, this may be regarded as the only hypothesis now known to science, and must, therefore, be accepted, at least provisionally, until some better is proposed. It is the only theory consistent with man’s place in the zoölogical world, and is borne out by numerous anatomical analogies, which have been referred to in my first lecture.
In fact, we are driven to it by necessity. No other origin of species than by transformation of earlier forms has been suggested, even by those who reject it. I do not speak of specific creation, for that supposition does not belong to science, but to an obscurant mysticism, which is the negative of all true knowledge.
But within the limits of the transformation theory there is more than one method by which varying forms are produced, and one of these may prove applicable to man, in whose earliest remains we have so far found no positive indications of a lower physical character than he now has.[36] So far, the “missing link” is as much out of sight as ever it was; so far, man appears to have been always what he is to-day.
May he not, as a species, have come into being through a short series of well-marked varieties, each produced by what is called “heterogenesis,” that is, the birth of children unlike their parents? All children are unlike their parents, more or less; and though at present this unlikeness is strictly within the limits of the several races, it is the opinion of some who have studied the matter, that in earlier geologic epochs changes in organic forms were more rapid and more profound than at present.
I am aware that this suggestion of heterogenesis looks like a return to the ancient doctrine called generatio equivoca, which, in its old form, is certainly obsolete. But there is no question that in many existing plants and animals we find singular evidence that from a given form another may arise, widely different in structure, and perpetuate itself indefinitely. I am convinced that the importance of these facts has never been properly appreciated by students of the origin of species, and of the origin of men in particular.
This, or any hypothesis of evolution, renders the supposition quite needless that the various races had distinct ancestral origins. Any evolutionist who accepts the view that man is but a differentiation from some anthropoid ape, is straining at a gnat after swallowing the camel, if he hesitates to believe that the comparatively slight differences between the races may not have originated from like influences. Furthermore, the resemblances between the various races are altogether too numerous and exact to render it likely that they could have been acquired through several ancestries running back to various lower zoological forms; a consideration greatly strengthened by the fact that man is the only species of his genus, and there is even no genus of his class closely related to himself. The chances that such a perfected animal should have been twice or oftener developed from the apes, monkeys or lemurs—his nearest cousins—are so small that we must dismiss the supposition.
It seems to me, indeed, that any one who will patiently study the parallelisms of growth in the arts and sciences, in poetry and objects of utility, throughout the various races of men, cannot doubt of their psychical identity. Still more, if he will acquaint himself with the modern science of Folk-lore, and will note how the very same tales, customs, proverbs, superstitions, games, habits, and so on, recur spontaneously in tribes severed by thousands of leagues, he will not think it possible that creatures so wholly identical could have been produced by independent lines of evolution.
The Birthplace of the Species.—Accepting the theories therefore of the evolutionists and the monogenists as the most plausible in the present state of science, it is quite proper to inquire where primeval man first appeared, and what were his social conditions and personal appearance.
To some it may seem premature to put such questions. They are needlessly timid. It is never too soon to propound any question in science; always too soon to declare that any has been finally and irrevocably answered.
Beginning our search for the birthplace of the species, we may consider that it will be indicated by the cumulative evidence of three conditions. We may look for it, (1) where the oldest relics of man or his industries have been found; (2) where the remains of the highest of the lower mammals, especially the man-like apes, have been exhumed, as it is assumed that man himself descended from some such form; and (3) where we know from palæontologic evidence a climate prevailed suited to man’s unprotected early conditions.
The first of these lines of investigation leads us to the science of “pre-historic archæology.” We shall discover that a study of this branch of learning is indispensable not only in this connection, but to solve many other questions in ethnography. Here its answer is unexpected. We have been taught by long tradition and venerable documents to look for the first home of primeval man “somewhere in Asia,” as Professor Max Müller generously puts it. He is inclined to think that from the highlands of that continent the tribes dispersed in various directions, some going to the extreme north, and then southward into Europe. Others would have it that the species itself came into life in the boreal regions, in that epoch when a mild climate prevailed there.
Such dreams meet no countenance from pre-historic archæology. The oldest remains of man’s arts, the first rude flints which he shaped into utensils and weapons, have not been discovered in Asia, and do not occur at all in the northern latitudes of either continent. They have been exhumed from the late tertiary or early quaternary deposits of southern England, of France, of the Iberian peninsula, and of the valleys of the Atlas in northern Africa. They have been searched for most diligently but in vain in Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, Siberia, and Canada. Not any of the older types of so-called “palæolithic” implements have been reported in early deposits in those countries.[37] But in the “river drift” of the Thames, the Somme, the Garonne, and the Tagus, quantities of rough stone implements have been disinterred, proving that in a remote epoch, at a time when the hippopotamus and rhinoceros, the African elephant and the extinct apes, found a congenial home near the present sites of London, Paris and Lisbon, man also was there. These relics, especially those found in Portugal, Central Spain and Southern France, are the very oldest proofs of the presence of man on the earth yet brought to light.
Where, now, do we find the remains of the highest of the lower animals? By a remarkable coincidence, in the same region. Of all the anthropoid apes yet known to the palæontologist, that most closely simulating man is the so-called Dryopithecus fontani, whose bones have been disinterred in the upper valleys of the Garonne, in Southern France. Its height was about that of a man, its teeth strongly resembled those of the Australians, and its food was chiefly vegetables and fruits. Other remains of a similar character have been found in Italy.[38]
It is well known to geologists that the apes and monkeys or Simiadæ were abundant and highly developed in Southern Europe in the pliocene and early pleistocene, just the time, as near as we can fix it, that man first appeared there. These facts answer the third of our inquiries—that for a climate suitable to man in an unprotected early condition, when he had to contend with the elements and the parsimony of nature, ill-provided as he is with many of the natural advantages possessed by other animals. At that date Southern Europe and Northern Africa were under what are called sub-tropical conditions, possessing a climate not wholly tropical, but yet singularly mild and equable. This we know from the remains, both animal and vegetable, preserved in the deposits of that epoch.
A series of negative arguments strengthens this conclusion. Where we find no remains of apes or monkeys of the higher class, we cannot place the scene of man’s ancestral evolution. This excludes America, where no tailless and no narrow-nosed (catarhine) monkeys and no large apes have been found; it excludes Australia, and all portions of the Old World north of the Alps and the Himalayas.
In view of such facts, Darwin reached the conclusion that it is most probable that our earliest progenitors lived on the African continent. There to this day we find on the one hand the human beings most closely allied to the lower animals, and the two species of these, the gorilla and the chimpanzee, now man’s nearest relations among the brutes.[39]
Darwin was disturbed in this conclusion by the presence of the large apes to whom I have referred in Southern Europe in late tertiary times. This, however, merely requires a modification in his conclusion, the general tenor of which, to the effect that man was first developed in the warm regions of the western or Atlantic portion of the Old World, somewhere within the present or ancient area of Africa, and not in Asia, has been steadily strengthened since the great evolutionist wrote his remarkable work on the Descent of Man.
Quaternary Geography of Europe and Africa.—The modification which I refer to is the obvious fact that since the late tertiary epoch, and especially during and after the glacial epoch, some material changes have taken place in the physical geography of Europe and Africa. To these I must now ask your particular attention, as they controlled not only the scene of man’s origin, but the lines of his early migrations.
When primal man, with no weapon or tool but one chipped from a stone flake, roamed over France, England and the Iberian peninsula, along with the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the elephant, the coast lines of Europe and North Africa were quite unlike those of to-day. England and Ireland were united to the mainland, and neither the Straits of Dover nor St. George’s Channel had been furrowed by the waves. Huge forests, such as can yet be traced near Cromer, covered the plains which are now the bottom of the German Ocean. In the broad shallow sea to the north, the mountainous regions of Scandinavia rose as islands, and between them and the Ural Mountains its waters spread uninterruptedly.
To the south, Northern Africa was united to Southern Europe by two wide land-bridges, one at the Straits of Gibraltar, one connecting Tunis with Sicily and Italy. The eastern portion of the Mediterranean was a contracted fresh-water lake, pouring its waters into a broad stream which connected the Atlantic with the Indian Oceans. This stream covered most of the present desert of the Sahara, the delta of Egypt, and a large portion of Arabia and Southern Asia. Its northern beach extended along the southern base of the Atlas Mountains from the River Dra on the Atlantic to the Gulf of Gabes in the Mediterranean; thence northward between Malta and Sicily to the Straits of Otranto; by the Ionian islands easterly till it intersected the present coast-line near the mouth of the Orontes; northeasterly to about Diarbekir, whence it trended south and east along the foot of the Zagros mountains to the Persian Gulf. From that point it followed the present coast-line to the mouth of the Indus, and thence pursued the base of the great northern mountain range to the mouth of the Ganges, covering the north of Hindustan, while the southern elevations of that spacious peninsula, as well as a large part of southern and western Arabia, rose as extensive irregular islands above the water. Toward them the mainland of equatorial Africa extended much nearer than at present. It included in its area the island of Madagascar, and reached far beyond into the Indian Ocean. Toward the north, peninsulas and chains of islands, now the summits of the plateaus and mountains of the central Sahara, reached nearly or quite to the present shore-line of the Mediterranean, about Tripolis.[40]
This disposition of the water left two great land areas in the old world, probably not actually united though separated only by narrow straits, one between the modern Tripolis and Tunis, and another on the northern Syrian coast. I represent these areas on the accompanying map, not indeed minutely, but approximately.
The general accuracy of the contours delineated are now fully recognized by geologists. They are attested by the remaining beach-lines of this primitive ocean, by the geographical distribution of its contemporary fauna and flora, and by the proofs of elevation and submergence along the shores and in the bottom of the adjacent seas and oceans. The “great sink” of the western Sahara, the vast “schotts,” or shallow saltwater ponds south of the Atlas, the salt Dead Sea at the bottom of a profound depression, prove that the drying up of the ancient ocean is scarcely yet complete.
Outlines of the Eastern Hemisphere in the Early Quaternary.
So familiar have these ancient continental areas become to geological students that they have been named like a newly-discovered island or cape. The northern continent has been called Eurasia, compounded of the words Europe and Asia, and the southern Indo-Africa, from a supposed union of India and Africa.[41]
Neither of these names is quite acceptable. The former leaves out of account the connection of Europe with Africa, which is of the first importance in the study of early man; and the latter assumes a geographic union between India and Africa, which is not likely to have existed in the period of man’s life on earth. I prefer the two names which I have inserted on the map; Eurafrica, indicating the connection between Europe and Africa, and Austafrica, designating the whole of the continent south of the ancient dividing sea. The name Asia should be confined to the Central Asian plateau and the regions watered by the countless streams which flow from it toward the north, east and south.
Relics of Man.—Such was the configuration of land in the Eastern hemisphere when man first appeared. We know he was there at that time. I have referred to his rude stone (palæolithic) implements exhumed from the river-drift of the Thames and the Somme, a deposit which dates from a time when the hippopotamus bathed in those rivers; still older seem some rough implements discovered in gravel layers near Madrid, Spain, deposited by some large river in early quaternary times. The worked flints near Lisbon were manufactured when a wide fresh-water lake existed where now not a trace of it is visible on the surface, and according to some archæologists, are the most ancient manufactured products yet discovered.[42]
In numerous parts of North Africa, as near Tlemcen in the province of Oran, and in Tunisia, the oldest forms of stone implements have been found in place beneath massive layers of quaternary travertin,[43] and in some of the most barren portions of the Libyan desert, now utterly sterile, the travertin contains abundant remains of leaves and grasses, along with chipped flints, proving that at the recession of this diluvial sea not only was the vegetation luxuriant, but man was then on the spot, as a hunter and fisher.[44]
Not less certain is it that he was a most ancient occupant of Austafrica. Chert implements of the true “river-drift” type have been discovered “in place” in quaternary stratified gravels near Thebes, and elsewhere in the Nile valley; and in the diamond field of the Cape of Good Hope, palæolithic forms have been exhumed from diluvial strata forty or fifty feet below the surface of the soil.[45]
From similar evidence we know that man spread widely over the habitable earth in that remote time. It is known to archæologists as the earliest period of the Stone Age, and the implements attributed to it are singularly alike in size and form. They seem to indicate a race of beings who were unprogressive, lacking perchance the stimulus of necessity in their mild climate and with their few needs.
The Glacial Age.—But a wonderful change took place in their conditions of life. Slowly, from some yet unexplained cause, mighty ice-sheets, thousands of feet in thickness, gathered around the poles, and collected on the flanks of the northern mountains. With silent but irresistible might they advanced over land and sea, crushing beneath them all animal and vegetable life, changing the perennial summer of Eurafrica to an Arctic winter, or at best to an Alpine climate. The tropical animals fled, the plants perished, and under the enormous weight of the ice-mass, the ocean bottom in the north was depressed a thousand feet or more. This in turn brought about material oscillations in the land levels to the south. The bed of the Mediterranean sank, that of the Sahara Sea slightly rose, leaving the latter little more than a swamp, while the former assumed the shape which we now see.
These alterations in the land areas and climatic conditions exerted the profoundest influence on the destiny of man. When with the increasing cold the other animals native to warm regions had fled or perished, he remained to encounter with undaunted mind the rigors of the boreal climate. Instead of depressing or extinguishing him, these very obstacles seem to have been the spurs to his intellectual progress.
Men were still in the lower stages of culture, with no knowledge of metal, not capable of polishing stones, without a domestic animal or trace of agriculture. Yet everywhere these artisans possessed skill and sentiments far above that of the highest anthropoid ape described by the zoölogist. They knew the use of fire, they constructed shelters, they dwelt together in bands, they possessed some means of navigating streams, they ate both vegetable and animal food, they decorated themselves with colored earth and ornaments, they wielded a club, they twisted fibres into ropes and strings, if occasion required they fastened together skins for clothing. All this is proved by a careful study of what tools and implements they have left us.
Development into Races.—Whatever may have been the physical type of men at their beginning, in culture they were upon the same level for a long while after they had dispersed over the globe.
When, where and how did they develop into the several distinct races that we now know?
We can answer these questions, not fully, but to some extent.
Man developed into certain strongly marked sub-species or races long before the dawn of history. More than six thousand years ago the racial traits of the black, the white, and the yellow races, and even of their subdivisions, were as pronounced and as ineffaceable as they are to-day. This we know from the representations on the Egyptian monuments of the third and sixth dynasties, from the comparative study of ancient skulls, and from the uniform testimony of the earliest writings, wherever we find them.
This permanent fixation of traits, this profound impression of peculiar features, was probably no rapid process, but a very slow one. It took place between the close of the glacial epoch and the proto-historic period. This interim gives time enough; at the lowest calculation, it was twenty thousand years, while others have placed it at a hundred thousand. The division of the species into races unquestionably was completed long before the present geologic period, and under conditions widely diverse from those now existing.[46]
As within these wide limits of time we can reply to the question when the races became such, so within similar broad boundaries of space we can answer where their peculiar types were developed.
At the dawn of history, all the clearly marked sub-species of man bore distinct relations in number and distribution to the great continental areas into which the habitable land of the globe is divided. Nearly the whole of Europe and its geographical appendix, North Africa, were in the possession of the white race; the true negro type was limited to Central and Southern Africa and its appended islands; the yellow or Mongolian type was scarcely found outside of Asia; and the American sub-species was absolutely confined to that continent.
The “Areas of Characterization.”—In claiming that each sub-species had its origin and developed its physical peculiarities in the land areas here assigned to it, the ethnographer is supported by the unanimous verdict of modern zoölogical science. “Whatever be the cause,” writes the Rev. Samuel Haughton, “the distribution of fauna shows clearly that forces have been at work, developing in each great continent animal forms peculiar to itself, and differing from the animal forms developed by other continents.”[47]
In ethnography, those geographical areas whose physical conditions have left a durable impress on their human inhabitants have been called either “geographical provinces” (Bastian) or “areas of characterization” (de Quatrefages). I prefer and shall adopt the latter as more indicative of the meaning of the term. It signifies that like physio-geographical conditions prevailing over a given area inhabited for many generations by the same peoples have impressed upon them certain traits, physical and psychical, which have become hereditary and continue indeterminately, even under changed conditions of existence.
This general law is the recognized basis of modern scientific ethnography.[48] It is open to numerous limitations, and its application must never be made without the consideration of accessory and modifying circumstances. For instance, certain areas are much more potent than others in the influence they exert on man: some act more powerfully on his mind than on his body, or the reverse; some peoples are more susceptible to physical influences of a given class than others; and the length of time required is variable.
Scheme of Geologic Time during the Age of Man in the Eastern Hemisphere.
| Quaternary, Diluvial or Pleistocene Epoch. | 1. Pre-glacial. | Europe connected with Africa. | Man homogeneous. |
| Temperature mild. | Industry palæolithic with simple implements. | ||
| African elephant in England. | Migrations extensive. | ||
| Tropical animals abundant. | Language rudimentary. | ||
| 2. Glacial. | Europe severed from Africa. | Man dividing into races. | |
| Temperature low. | Industry palæolithic with compound implements. | ||
| Reindeer in France. | Cave dwellings. | ||
| Arctic animals abundant. | Migrations limited; races in fixed areas. | ||
| 3. Post-glacial. | Continents assume present forms. | Races completely established. | |
| Temperature rising. | Industry neolithic. | ||
| Temperate zones established. | Beginning of sedentary life. | ||
| Languages developed in classes. | |||
| Present or Alluvial Epoch. | 1. Pre-historic. | Geographic conditions undisturbed. | Races develop into contact. |
| Wild animals not diminished. | Industry of stone and copper. | ||
| 2. Proto-historic. | Conditions altered by agriculture. | Great migrations begin. | |
| Wild animals slain or tamed. | Industry of bronze and iron. | ||
| 3. Historic. | Geographic conditions greatly modified by man. | Extensive mingling of races. | |
| All lower animals subjugated. | Development of nations. | ||
According to the analogy of other organic beings, man would have been more impressible to his surroundings in the early history of his existence as a species, the young, either as an individual or a genus, being more plastic than the old. Furthermore, in his then condition of culture, or absence of culture, he had less to oppose to the assaults of his environment.
Classification of Races.—It is not possible in the present status of the science of man to point out precisely how the various conditions of the great continental areas reacted on the homogeneous primitive type to develop the races as we know them. The same difficulty encounters us with other animals and with plants. We know, however, that at the dawn of history each of these areas was peopled by nations resembling each other much more than they resembled nations of any of the other areas.
In addition to the great continents there were many lesser regions, peninsulas and islands, usually on the borders of the main areas of characterization, where intermingling of types was sure to arise, and other types be formed, who in turn received some particular impress from their environment.
These considerations prompt me to offer the following as the most appropriate scheme in the present condition of science for the subdivision of the species Man into its several races or varieties.
I. The Eurafrican Race.—Traits.—Color white, hair wavy, nose narrow, jaws straight, skull variable, languages inflectional, religions ideal.
II. The Austafrican Race.—Traits.—Color black, hair woolly, nose flat, jaws protruding, skull long, languages agglutinative, religions material.
III. The Asian Race.—Traits.—Color yellowish or brownish, hair straight, nose flat or medium, jaws straight, skull broad and high, languages isolating or agglutinative, religions material.
IV. The American Race.—Traits.—Color coppery, hair straight, nose narrow, jaws straight, skull variable, languages incorporating, religions ideal.
V. Insular or Litoral Peoples.—Traits.—Color dark, hair lank or wavy, languages agglutinative.
In this scheme the more prominent and permanent traits are named first. While individuals of pure blood can easily be found in all the races who do not correspond in all particulars to these descriptions, I do not hesitate to assert that ninety-five per cent. of the whole of the pure blood of any of the races here classified will correspond to the standards given.
Subdivisions of Races.—The further subdivisions of ethnography follow to some extent the important doctrine of the “areas of characterization,” that is, they are geographical; but as the classification of men advances in minuteness, other considerations become paramount, notably, language and government. These elements allow us to subdivide a race into its branches; a branch into its stocks; a stock into its groups, and these again into tribes, peoples, or nations.
Classified in this manner, the human species presents the subdivisions shown on the adjacent scheme:
General Ethnographic Scheme.
| Race. | Traits. | Branches. | Stocks. | Groups or Peoples. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eurafrican. | Color white. | I. South Mediterranean. | 1. Hamitic. | 1. Libyan. |
| 2. Egyptian. | ||||
| 3. East African. | ||||
| Hair wavy. | 2. Semitic. | 1. Arabian. | ||
| 2. Abyssynian. | ||||
| 3. Chaldean. | ||||
| Nose narrow. | II. North Mediterranean. | 1. Euskaric. | 1. Euskarian. | |
| 2. Aryac. | Indo-Germanic or Celtindic peoples. | |||
| 3. Caucasic. | Peoples of the Caucasus. | |||
| Austafrican. | Color black or dark. | I. Negrillo. | 1. Central African. | Dwarfs of the Congo. |
| 2. South African. | Bushmen, Hottentots. | |||
| Hair frizzly. | ||||
| II. Negro. | 1. Nilotic. | Nubian. | ||
| 2. Soudanese. | ||||
| 3. Senegambian. | ||||
| 4. Guinean. | ||||
| Nose broad. | III. Negroid. | 1. Bantu. | Caffres and Congo tribes. | |
| Asian. | Color yellow or olive. | I. Sinitic. | 1. Chinese. | Chinese. |
| 2. Thibetan. | Natives of Thibet. | |||
| 3. Indo-Chinese. | Burmese, Siamese. | |||
| Hair straight. | II. Sibiric. | 1. Tungusic. | Manchus, Tungus. | |
| 2. Mongolic. | Mongols, Kalmucks. | |||
| 3. Tataric. | Turks, Cossacks. | |||
| Nose medium. | 4. Finnic. | Finns, Magyars. | ||
| 5. Arctic. | Chukchis, Ainos. | |||
| 6. Japanic. | Japanese, Koreans. | |||
| American. | Color coppery. | I. Northern. | 1. Arctic. | Eskimos. |
| 2. Atlantic. | Tinneh, Algonkins, Iroquois. | |||
| 3. Pacific. | Chinooks, Kolosh, etc. | |||
| Hair straight or wavy. | II. Central. | 1. Mexican. | Nahuas, Tarascos. | |
| 2. Isthmian. | Mayas, Chapanecs. | |||
| Nose medium. | III. Southern. | 1. Atlantic. | Caribs, Arawaks, Tupis. | |
| 2. Pacific. | Chibehas, Qquichuas. | |||
| Insular and Litoral Peoples. | Color dark. | I. Negritic. | 1. Negrito. | Mincopies, Aetas. |
| 2. Papuan. | New Guineans. | |||
| Hair wavy or frizzly. | II. Malayic. | 3. Melanesian. | Feejeeans, etc. | |
| 1. Malayan. | Malays, Tagalas. | |||
| 2. Polynesian. | Pacific Islanders. | |||
| Nose medium or narrow. | III. Australic. | 1. Australian. | Australians. | |
| 2. Dravidian. | Dravidas, Mundas. | |||
That these distinctions may be plain I append definitions of the ethnographic terms employed.
Race.—A variety or sub-species of the species Man, presenting a number of distinct and permanent (hereditary) traits of the character above described.
Branch.—A portion of a race separated geographically, linguistically, or otherwise, from other portions of the race.
Stock.—A portion of a branch united by some prominent trait, especially language, offering presumptive evidence of demonstrable relationship. The individual elements of a stock are its peoples.
A group consists of a number of these peoples who are connected together by a closer tie, geographical, linguistic, or physical, than that which unites the members of the stock.
A tribe is a body of men collected under one government. They are presumably of the same race and dialect.
A nation, on the other hand, is a body of men under one government, frequently of different languages and races. Its members have no presumed relationship further than that they belong to the same species.
There are some other terms the precise meaning of which should be defined before we proceed, the more so as there is not that uniformity in their use among ethnographers which were desirable.
This very word ethnos, with its adjective ethnic, is an example. What is an ethnos? I know no better word for it in English than a people, as I have already explained this word,—one of the elements of a stock all whose members, there is reason to believe, have a demonstrable relationship. Thus we should speak of the Aryan stock, made up of the Latin, Greek, Celtic and other peoples. The relationship among the members of a people is closer than that between the members of a stock. People corresponds to the Old English folk (German Volk), but folk in the modern English scientific terms “folk-lore,” “folk-medicine,” has acquired a different signification.
Culture and civilization are other terms not always correctly employed. The former is the broader, the generic word. All forms of human society show more or less culture; but civilization is a certain stage of culture, and a rather high one, when men unite under settled governments to form a state or commonwealth (civitas) with acknowledged individual rights (civis). This presupposes a knowledge of various arts and developed mental powers.
Much attention was paid by older writers to dividing the progress of culture into a number of stages or stadia. One of these, an American author, Lewis H. Morgan, suggested an elaborate scheme according to which the periods of man’s development should correspond with historical conditions of culture, and these he divided into lower, middle and upper states of savagery, barbarism, and civilization, each characterized by the introduction of some new art.
The problem is far too complicated to admit of any such mechanical solution. The possession of a given art, as the bow and arrow, or smelting iron, does not lift a people, nor is it an indication of their culture. Peoples low in one point are high in others; they develop along different lines, with scarcely a common measure, and their place in a general scheme must be determined by an exhaustive investigation of all their powers and conquests, and perhaps a comparison with some other standards than those which we have been brought up to consider the best.
LECTURE IV.
THE EURAFRICAN RACE; SOUTH MEDITERRANEAN BRANCH.
Contents.—The White Race. Synonyms. Properly an African Race; relative areas; purest specimens. Types of the White Race; Libyo-Teutonic type; Cymric type; Celtic type; Euscaric type. Variability of traits. Primal home of the White Race not in Asia, but in Eurafrica. Early migrations and subdivisions. North Mediterranean and South Mediterranean Branches.
A.—The South Mediterranean Branch.
I. The Hamitic Stock. Relation to Semitic. 1. The Libyan Group. Location. Peoples included. Physical appearance. The Libyan blondes: languages. Early history; European affiliations; relations to Iberian tribes; the names Iberi and Berberi. Government. Migration. The Etruscans as Libyans. Later history; present culture. Syrian Hamites and their influence. 2. The Egyptian Group. Kinship to Libyans. Physical appearance. The stone age in Egypt. Antiquity of Egyptian culture. Its influence. Physical traits. 3. The East African Group. Relations to Egypt.
II. The Semitic Stock.—First entered Arabia from Africa. 1. The Arabian Group. Early divisions and culture. The Arabs. Physical types; mental temperament; religious idealism. 2. The Abyssinian Group. Tribes included. Period of migration. Condition. 3. The Chaldean Group. Tribes included. The modern Jew.
The leading race in all history has been the White Race. It is proper therefore that it should have our chief attention in the study of the distribution of the species. By some writers it is called the Caucasian, by others the Japetic, and by others again the European race—all inaccurate terms, for the race never originated in the Caucasus, never descended from the mythical Japetus or Japheth, and when first it appeared on the horizon of history, its most extensive possessions and the seats of its highest culture were not in Europe, nor yet in Asia, but in Africa.
Scheme of the European Race: South Mediterranean Branch.
(Extinct peoples in italics.)
| I. Hamitic Stock. | 1. Libyan Group. | Numidians, Getulians, Libyans, Maurianians,, Guanches, Berbers, Rifians, Zouaves, Kabyles, Tuareks, Tibbus, Ghadumes, Mzabites, Ghanatas, Etruscans, Amorites, Assyrians, Hittites. (?) |
| 2. Egyptian Group. | Copts, Fellaheen. | |
| 3. East African Group. | Gallas, Somalis, Danakils, Bedjas, Bilins, Afars, Khamirs. | |
| II. Semitic Stock. | 1. Arabian Group. | Himyarites, Sabeans, Nabotheans, Arabs, Bedawin, Ehkilis. |
| 2. Abyssinian Group. | Amharnis, Tigris, Tigrinas, Gheez, Ethiopians, Harraras. | |
| 3. Chaldean Group. | Israelites, Arameans, Samaritans. | |
This statement may astonish you, and I know no writer who has properly emphasized the fact that the white race is geographically and historically an African race. I have calculated with some care the area of its control of the three continents when their inhabitants first became known. The results are these: The white race then possessed:[49]
| In Asia | 2,500,000 | square | miles. |
| In Europe | 3,000,000 | “ | “ |
| In Africa | 3,500,000 | “ | “ |
These figures vindicate for the race the title I have given it—Eurafrican.
More than this: the purest and finest physical specimens of the white race always have been and still are found native to African soil; and the leading nations of the race, those who have most contributed to its glory, and to the advance of the civilization of the world, either have resided in Africa or can be traced to it as their ancestral home.
Types of the White Race.—Let us first define the characteristics, physical and mental, of the white race.
In one of its pronounced types, the individuals are blondes, tall in stature, the eyes blue or grey, the hair yellow or reddish and wavy, the beard full, the nose narrow and prominent (leptorhin), the chin well defined, the jaws straight (orthognathic), the skull long (dolichocephalic) or medium, the eyes narrow (microsemes), the supra-orbital ridges rather prominent, the face moderately oval.
This is the typical appearance of the ancient Goths, Teutons and Scandinavians, and of the modern Swedes and Germans. It was also that of the ancient Libyans, and is still preserved in the greatest purity among their descendants in Morocco and Algiers; hence I shall call it the Libyo-Teutonic type.
A second type is also tall in stature, but red-haired, freckled complexion, the face and forehead broad, the cheek bones prominent, the eyes nearly circular (megasemes), the jaws and mouth projecting (prognathic), the skulls broad and high (brachycephalic-hypsistenocephalic), the chin square and firm.
This is the type we see preserved in some of the Highland Scotch clans, and in the “Tuatha de Danann” of Ireland, recalling the large-limbed and red-haired “Caledonians” of Tacitus, and those ancient Britons who, under Queen Boadicea, withstood so valiantly the Roman legions. The Gauls or Cimbri of Belgium and northern France were of this type, and hence it has been called the “Cymric” type.
But there is a second Celtic type, also of vast antiquity, claimed by some to be the only pure form. In it the skull is also broad—broader than the former variety; but the stature is undersized, the hair and eyes dark-brown, the complexion brunette, the orbits rounded, the forehead full. Modern representatives of this type are the dark clans of the Highlanders, the Irish west of the river Shannon, the Manx, the Welsh, the Bretons of France, the Auvergnats, the Walloons of Belgium and the Ladins of eastern Switzerland.
The most ancient known seats of these dark Celts were in extreme western Europe and the isles adjacent. This location points them out as one of the oldest peoples in Europe, whether their presence is explained by immigration or autochthonous descent. Part of their possessions in early historic times was in the Iberian peninsula, along the Cantabrian mountains in northern Spain. Here they were in immediate contact with members of the white race of a different type, the Euscarians or Basques.
In them the stature is medium, the form symmetrical, hair and eyes are dark but rarely black, the complexion dark and sallow, the face oval, and the skull long, the length being in the posterior (occipital) region. Although the last mentioned is an important distinction between the Celtic and the Euskaric skull, there is unquestionably a closer resemblance physically between the Celts and Basques, who speak totally diverse tongues, than between the Celts and Cymri, whose tongue was the same.
In these four typical groups from the extreme west of Europe we find sharp contrasts within limited areas, among peoples some of whom are unquestionably consanguine. Two of the groups, the Teutonic and Cymric, belong in color and hair and stature to the blonde type, but differ profoundly in shape of skull and facial bones; the two others belong to the brunette type, but differ equally in osseous character. In general physical traits the Celtic differs less from the Euskaric than from the Cymric type, as was recognized by the historian Tacitus.
These facts bring out an ethnic principle of importance—the variability of traits within the racial limits—and this becomes more marked as the race is higher in the scale of organic development. No race remains closer to its type than the Austafrican, none departs from it so constantly as the Eurafrican. Wherever we find the unmixed white race we find its blonde and brunette varieties, its prognathic and orthognathic jaws, its long-skulled and broad-skulled heads.[50] To establish genealogic schemes exclusively upon these differences, as has been the work of so many living anthropologists, is to build houses of cards.
These contrasts are presented to us daily. The researches of Virchow, De Candolle, Kollmann, and many others, prove that in the same city, in the same family, the children to-day are born brunettes or blondes, dark or light eyed, to some degree broad or narrow skulled, with but partial reference to their parents’ peculiarities. The aberrant types are usually about twenty per cent. of the whole. It seems generally to have been so in the unmixed white race wherever located.
All such variations, however, remain strictly within the racial lines, and are not approximations to other races. Each race retains to-day the characteristics of its earliest representatives, so far as we know them.
Primal Home of the White Race.—Where should we look for these earliest representatives, for the primal home of the Eurafrican race? The usual answer has been “in Asia,” but now that answer is rejected by all the younger and most earnest ethnologists.
A steady stream of information has of late been contributed by the sciences of linguistics, palæontology, pre-historic archæology and racial anatomy, sufficient to convince even the skeptical that not Asia, but the western water-shed of the Eastern Continent, was the area of characterization which developed this race with its marked physical traits and singular mental endowments. In the previous lecture I have shown you that man himself probably came into being as such within the limits of that region which I have described as Eurafrica; and as its conditions were such as to foster his transformation from some inferior primate, so they continued, though profoundly altered, to favor his growth, as they still do continue to-day. It is by no mere accident or result of political manœuvres that western Europe has for two thousand years produced the mightiest nations and greatest minds of the earth.
The discussion of the precise locality where in Europe the primitive man developed into the white race has occupied many learned pens in the last score of years. But by nearly all of them the discussion has been limited to the birthplace of merely the Aryan linguistic stock—an unfortunate narrowness of view, which has prevented a comprehensive grasp of the question at issue.[51]
The Aryan peoples present by no means the only, nor yet the purest types of the white race. I have seen quite as noble blondes among the Kabyles of the Djurjura as in Denmark, quite as handsome brunettes among the Basques of the Pyrenees as among the Celts of France or the Italians. A broad construction of the question must include all these, and in this spirit I approach it.
We must search for the first abode, the primitive “area of characterization” of the white race:
1. Where its most ancient residence and greatest numbers were in earliest historic times.
2. Where the prehistoric remains prolong that residence most remotely back.
3. Where the earliest forms of linguistic structure continue to exist in large communities.
4. Where its purest types are retained in considerable numbers.
5. Where the climatic conditions are favorable to the physical traits of the race.
If we can select a locality in which all of these arguments unite, the cumulative evidence is so powerful that we may consider the question settled.
I have already shown that at the dawn of history the white race possessed either in Europe or Africa a far larger area than in Asia, and possessed it practically exclusively. The most recent researches in the pile dwellings of the Swiss lakes and the plain of the Po show that the same race inhabited them from the classic period of Greece to far back in the stone age.
The most ancient shell-heaps or kitchen-middens on the shores of Portugal contain skulls of the peculiar type of the Basques of to-day. The hiatus or gap which was once supposed to exist between palæolithic and neolithic culture in France has been bridged over by numerous observations, showing that the same race continued to live and grow there.[52] As for language, every linguist recognizes the agglutinative type of the Basque, and the semi-agglutinative character of the Berber as more antique forms than the inflectional caste of Aryan or Semitic tongues. Nowhere else do white tribes speak an agglutinative tongue, except a few in the Caucasus, where we know they settled at a comparatively recent period.
The purest types of the whites in any large number have always been found in Western Europe and Northwestern Africa. There the blondes were represented by the Suevi, the Goths, the Vandals, the Cymri, the Berbers; the brunettes by the Euskarians, the Celts, and the native Italic tribes. In the Orient, the Parsees, the high-caste Brahmins, the Siagosch of the Hindu Kusch, and some Caucasian tribes, have by close intermarriage retained in a measure the traits of the race; but confessedly not in the same distinctness as the nations of Western Europe; nor do the Semitic peoples of Asia present the purity of the type with anything like the distinctness of the descendants of the Libyans in the valleys of the Atlas. Finally, we do not anywhere in Asia find the physical conditions favorable to the development of the white race—the moist, cool, cloudy climate, the extensive shady forests covering broad areas of low elevation, with absence of malaria and diminished demand on the chylopoietic organs.
Ethnic Chart of the Eurafrican Race.
Early Migrations and Subdivisions.—It is not necessary to suppose that the different peoples of the race developed themselves from one central point. The contrary is more probable.
Beginning at the extreme West of Europe, and its appendix North Africa, the race pursued an easterly course, divided by the great intervening sea of the Mediterranean into two sections, which for convenience I designate as the “North Mediterranean” and the “South Mediterranean” branches, though it will be seen that these geographical limits are not to be taken absolutely.
The North Mediterranean branch embraces as its most important member the Indo-Germanic peoples. When first heard of in history, this stock extended along the shores and islands of Europe from Cape Finisterre to the Gulf of Finland, occupying all of Central Europe and much of Asia Minor, the regions of Modern Persia, and at a later date the southern vales of the Himalayas. Its northern limits have always been in contiguity with the Asian or Yellow race. Stretch a line on the map from Singapore to St. Petersburg, continue it to the Atlantic, and you have roughly the ethnic boundary which has ever separated the races, and does so to-day.
In western Europe, south of the Aryac was the Euskaric stock, occupying central Spain, central and southern France, portions of Italy, and various islands in the Mediterranean.
As speaking a language of a different family from the prevailing inflectional type of the race, it is spoken of as “allophyllic.” It does not stand alone in this respect. Some of the white Caucasian tribes speak similar agglutinative tongues, and it is supposed by some that the ancient Pictish, Illyrian, Lycian, Van, and Etruscan were of similar character. Probably many such languages obtained which are now extinct.
The South Mediterranean Branch consists of two related stocks, which have been called the Hamitic and the Semitic. These names are not objectionable, in so far as they indicate a distant genealogic unity, still recognizable, between the two branches; but should not in any way be accepted as acknowledging as historic facts the myth of the Deluge and their origin in Asia. The reverse is true. The migrations of both stocks have been from west to east, and the two great branches of the White Race entering Asia, the one by the Bosphorus and the second by the Isthmus of Suez, encountered each other after thousands of years of separation in the region where the venerable myth locates their point of departure.