The sense of differences of colour, which, for all our talk of common humanity, still plays a great and, politically, often an inconvenient part in the history of the world, finds forcible expression in the Vedic descriptions of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains of India. In a well-known passage the god Indra is praised for having protected the Aryan colour, and the word meaning colour (varna) is used down to the present day as the equivalent of caste, more especially with reference to the castes believed to be of Aryan descent.[[7]]

[7]. Report Brit. Assoc., 1881, p. 683.

The word “caste” is of Portuguese origin. In the 179th hymn of the first Mandala of the Rig-Veda, as Dr. Gerson da Cunha points out,[[8]] the word varna is used in the dual number, ubhau varnau, “two colours,” white of the Aryans and black of the Dasyus—that is, of the “Dravidian” aborigines, who are elsewhere called “black-skinned,” “unholy,” “excommunicated.” Other texts dwell on their low stature, coarse features, and their voracious appetite. The Rig-Veda employs the word anâsa—“noseless”—to characterise the Dasyus and Daityas, which designations mean “thieves” or “demons.” It is hardly an exaggeration to say that from these sources there might be compiled a fairly accurate anthropological definition of the jungle tribes of to-day.

[8]. “Presidential Address: The Nasal Index in Biological Anthropology,” Journ. Anth. Soc. of Bombay, 1892, p. 542.

Thus were the foundations of descriptive anthropology unconsciously laid.

In our own day racial characters are seized upon in the same manner, and racial antipathy adds fuel to its own fire in regarding traits which differ from those of the speaker or writer as being ugly, objectionable, or of low type. “The study of race,” said the late Sir William Flower (1831-1899), “is at a low ebb indeed when we hear the same contemptuous epithet of ‘nigger’ applied indiscriminately by the English abroad to the blacks of the West Coast of Africa, to Kafirs of Natal, the Lascars of Bombay, the Hindoos of Calcutta, the aborigines of Australia, and even the Maories of New Zealand.”[[9]] The Englishman who contemns as a “nigger” any dark-skinned native has not advanced in race discrimination beyond his remote kinsman who crossed into the valley of the Indus some four thousand years ago.

[9]. Report Brit. Assoc., 1881, p. 683.

Hippocrates.

Hippocrates (460-357 B.C.), “the Father of Physic,” was certainly a pioneer in physical anthropology. He says: “I will pass over the smaller differences among nations, but will now treat of such as are great either from nature or custom; and, first, concerning the macrocephali. There is no other race of men which have heads in the least resembling theirs.” He believed that this elongated conformation of the head was originally produced artificially; but subsequently it was inherited, or, as he puts it: “Thus, at first usage operated, so that this constitution was the result of force; but in the course of time it was formed naturally, so that usage had nothing to do with it”—a view adopted many centuries later by Buffon and others.

Aristotle.