I.
We have first the Negro, the fossil, the black, or antediluvian man. The eyes, nostrils, and lips are drawn downwards in melancholy lines. He is cross-toothed (prognathous), triangular-headed, has flat feet, long heels, an imperfect pelvis, but a very powerful digestive organ, and a correspondingly enormous mouth.
The Oceanic Negro is the best example of this group. He is slow of temperament, unskilled, his mechanical ingenuity being that of a child; he never goes beyond geometrical ornamentation; builds tumuli or triangular wigwams; lives on what he finds by chance, and, at the best, hunts or fishes. His reasoning faculty is very limited, his imagination slow, but his perceptive faculties (the senses) are highly developed. He is altogether incapable of rising from a fact to a principle. He cannot create beauty, for he is indifferent to any ideal conception. He possesses only from 75–83½ cubic inches of brain, his facial angle being about 85½ degrees. This lowest group of mankind branches off into different types. The general features of the group have neither changed nor improved. The Negro is still the woolly-headed, animal-faced being, represented on the tombs of the Pharaohs, because his bodily structure, his facial lines have not altered during thousands of years. In studying the artistic products, the customs and manners of this group, we can picture to ourselves the state in which Asiatics and Europeans must have lived during the oldest stone period. The Negroes use the same kind of flint instruments, manufacture the same crude kind of pottery, adorn their clubs, paddles, and the cross-beams of their huts with the same rope and serpent-like entangled windings and twistings, that are found in various parts of the globe of pre-historic times. The ruling lines of the face and head of the Negro are reflected in his triangular or mound-like architectural constructions.