The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920

by Various

ANTHROPOLOGY

MAN—PAST AND PRESENT. By A. H. Keane. Revised and largely rewritten by A. Hingston Quiggin and A. C. Haddon. Cambridge University Press. 36s.

What are the chief natural divisions of mankind, and how did they come to be formed? Such is the specific problem of ethnology, and it is one on which the whole body of the anthropological sciences may be said to converge. In a sense physical anthropology—that is to say, the study of the bodily characters of man—has the most direct bearing on the subject. The members of the human family are distinguished by marked differences of physique, which are clearly to a large extent the product of heredity. On the other hand, adaptation to environment must tend to confine each variety to the most suitable area; so that geography, in the specialised form known as anthropo-geography, will be required to help the argument out. Moreover, the history of culture, as variously comprising ideas, institutions, arts, and languages, provides important evidence of those movements and clashings of peoples whereby our ever-shifting balance has been maintained between the forces making severally for a differentiation and for a fusion of types. Nor is it enough for the ethnologist to keep his eye fixed on the existing distribution of these types over the wide surface of the globe. His outlook as it turns towards the past must embrace a tract of time even more formidably wide, inasmuch as we can never hope to explore it as thoroughly. Altogether, the speculative problem is as baffling as it is alluring. On the practical side, too, there is the question to be faced how far civilisation can afford to experiment in the direction of race-amalgamation—whether, in short, physical diversity is or is not compatible with moral unity within the kingdom of man.

Dr. A. H. Keane, for some time Professor of Hindustani at University College, London, was born in 1833 and died in 1912. He was the only Englishman in post-Darwinian times to attempt a grand synthesis of the facts relating to the origin and interrelation of the main human groups. In Ethnology (1896) and Man—Past and Present (1899) he put forward what is in effect the same theory—one to which he adhered for the rest of his days, as may be gathered from his article on Ethnology in Hastings' Dictionary of Religion and Ethics, published in the year of his death. This theory amounted to a vindication on evolutionary grounds of Linnæus' genealogical tree of the human family, with its four branches, the Æthiopian, Mongolian, American, and Caucasian. Keane postulated that these primary groups were independently derived from a common primeval ancestry, first the negro family branching off, then somewhat later the Caucasian and Mongolo-American splitting out of the main stem. Thereupon he brought geography into play, supposing each type to develop in an isolated "cradle-land" where its fundamental characters became fixed, so that no subsequent intermingling could wholly obliterate them. Nor is it for him simply a question of physical differentiation. There are mental and moral peculiarities likewise that go with the race, and these are reflected in markedly divergent outgrowths of culture. On the strength of these assumptions it was possible to construct a highly systematic account of mankind in the mass. For the big differences were taken as established at the outset once for all; whereas the myriad smaller differences that actually distinguish the peoples of the earth were regarded as mere aberrations from these primary norms.

Twenty-one years, however, of further discovery do not confirm this bold explanation of the genesis of human diversity, but even militate against it in a negative way, in so far as some of Keane's most trusted proofs are shown to be invalid. The great antiquity, for instance, of certain fossil men found in America turns out to be by no means so certain as he was ready to believe, and the claim of the New World to rank as an area of primary characterisation is correspondingly weakened. Again, a great deal more is now known about the racial types of Pleistocene Europe, and their multiplicity is hard to reconcile with the view that in early times a given geographical province would foster a single well-marked variety. Thus, so far as regards the prehistoric evidence, the bottom is pretty well knocked out of the theory; and thereupon the genetic significance of the attempted classification of types disappears, unless a new theory of origin can be substituted.

Now to attempt such a reconstruction of the whole argument is a task which no editor as such could well undertake, for he must in that case assume responsibility for every word that appears, the original author being reduced to a mute shade in the background. On the other hand, if the explanation of the present heterogeneity of mankind has become more difficult than ever, the description of it may be improved by incorporating the results of the latest field work. Hence the questionable pedigree is withdrawn; but the list of the surviving members of the human family is carefully revised. A systematic appearance is imparted to the catalogue by dividing up the groups according to the nature of their hair. This leaves Keane's classification almost unaltered in its surface appearance, since his Æthiopians form the woolly-haired division, his Caucasians the wavy-haired, the only difference being that the Australians who count as wavy-haired must now come across from the negroids, of whose characters they otherwise appear to possess a share. As for the Mongolians and Americans, since both alike are straight-haired, they need no longer be kept apart. It is a clever feat of substitution, yet is one that is of little use to the student of the evolutionary problem. The systematist gets on very well with hair as his differentia until the question of development is raised. He thereupon finds, first, that to relate present types to former ones is impossible by this means, since prehistoric skulls have lost their hair entirely; secondly, that the interrelations of present types are not made any clearer, since no one has worked out the effects of cross-breeding on the hair of the offspring. Thus it is a scandalous fact that despite the copious interbreeding of whites with woolly-haired negroes and straight-haired aborigines in America, no trustworthy data are available from this or any other quarter in regard to the physical results of such miscegenation. Is waviness of hair a pure or a mixed form, or sometimes one and sometimes the other? Our authorities do not seem to know; yet, so long as the matter is left undecided, relationships based on similarity of hair can have no genetic significance.

Another consequence of the suppression of the theory of a radical division of the human stocks brought about by their development in isolation is that the assignment of a special kind of mentality to the different races loses most of its point. This never was a very convincing side of Keane's work, for he seemed to lack the delicacy of touch needed in order to bring out the subtler shades of meaning in primitive religion, and hence could hardly do justice to the surest diagnostic of the mental life. As it is, one is inclined to smile at the drastic characterisations of peoples that survive, without the excuse of a genetic explanation, in the revised text. Thus the former edition summed up the Papuasian as "even more cruel than the African Negro." This goes out in the present edition; but as we read immediately below that the Tasmanian, another branch of the stock, was "far less cruel," we have lingering doubts about the Papuasian character as regards the habit of "seeing red." Without altogether denying the possibility of an ethnic psychology, one may ask what scientific basis is provided for one here. Whether Keane was right or wrong, he did mean that temperament went with ancestry. But the present work does not intend us to deduce a man's morality from his hair; so that the bearing of mental traits on the problem of classification can no longer be regarded as essential.

In conclusion, it is only fair to state that no pains have been spared to secure the utmost accuracy in the statement of facts. As an ethnology the book may be disappointing, because it amounts to an admission that Keane's original attempt to construct a genealogy of the human race outran the evidence. On the other hand, as an ethnographic conspectus it will be very serviceable to the student. The idealist, too, who is in a hurry to establish a uniform civilisation for all may here come upon a useful reminder of the actual diversity of mankind, though he may console himself with the thought that, as Heracleitus long ago observed, "opposite friction knits the world together."