Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

Contents.—Differences and resemblances in individuals and races the basis of Ethnography. The Bones. Craniology. Its limited value. Long and short skulls. Sutures. Inca bone. The orbital index. The nasal index. The maxillary and facial angles. The cranial capacity. The teeth. The iliac bones. Length of the arms. The flattened tibia. The projecting heel. The heart line. The Color. Its extent; cause; scale of colors. Color of the eyes. The Hair. Shape in cross section; abundance. The muscular structure; anomalies in; muscular habits; arrow releases. Steatopygy. Stature and proportion; the “canon of proportion;” special senses; the color sense. Ethnic relations of the sexes. Correlation of physical traits to vital powers. Causes of the fixation of ethnic traits. Climate; food supply; natural selection; conscious selection; the physical ideal; sexual preference; abhorrence of incest; exogamous marriages. Causes of variation in types. The mingling of races. Physical criteria of racial superiority. Review of physical elements.

That no two persons are identical in appearance is such a truism that we are apt to overlook its significance. The parent can rarely be recognized from the traits of the child, the brother from those of the sister, the family from its members.

On the other hand, the individual peculiarities become lost in those of the race. It is a common statement that to our eyes all Chinamen look alike, or that one cannot distinguish an Indian “buck” from a “squaw.” Yet you recognize very well the one as a Chinaman, the other as an Indian. The traits of the race thus overslaugh the variable characters of the family, the sex or the individual, and maintain themselves uniform and unalterable in the pure blood of the stock through all experience.

This fact is the corner-stone of the science of Ethnography, whose aim is to study the differences, physical and mental, between men in masses, and ascertain which of these differences are least variable and hence of most value in classifying the human species into its several natural varieties or types.

In daily life and current literature the existence of such varieties is fully recognized. The European and African, or White and Black races, are those most familiar to us; but the American Indian and the Mongolian are not rare, and are recognized also as distinct from each other and ourselves. These common terms for the races are not quite accurate; but they illustrate a tendency to identify the most prominent types of the species with the great continental areas, and in this I shall show that the popular judgment is in accord with scientific reasoning.

If an ordinary observer were asked what the traits are which fix the racial type in his mind, he would certainly omit many which are highly esteemed by the man of science. He would have nothing to say, for instance, about the internal structures or organs, because they are not visible; but in approaching the subject from a scientific direction, we must lay most stress upon these, as their peculiarities decide the external traits which strike the eye.

Nor does the casual observer note the mental or physical differences which exist between the races whom he recognizes; yet these are not less permanent and not less important than those which concern the physical economy only. In both these directions the student of ethnography as a science must pursue careful researches.

In the present lecture I shall pass in review the physical elements held to be most weighty in the discrimination of racial types; and, first, those relating to

The Bones.—Most important are the measurements of the skull, that science called craniology, or craniometry.

Ethnologists who are merely anatomists have made too much of this science. They have applied it to the exclusion of other elements, and have given it a prominence which it does not deserve. The shape of the skull is no distinction of race in the individual; only in the mass, in the average of large numbers, has it importance. Even here its value is not racial. Within the limits of the same people, as among the Slavonians, for example, the most different skulls are found, and even the pure-blood natives of some small islands in the Pacific Ocean present widely various forms.[1]