Turning now to the double continent of America, we find in this New World a problem of race remarkably different from that of the Old World. The traveller who should cross the earth from Nova Zemlya to the Cape of Good Hope or Van Diemen’s Land would find in its various climates various strongly-marked kinds of men, white, yellow, brown, and black. But if Columbus had surveyed America from the Arctic to the Antarctic regions, he would have found no such extreme unlikeness in the inhabitants. Apart from the Europeans and Africans who have poured in since the fifteenth century, the native Americans in general might be, as has often been said, of one race. Not that they are all alike, but their differences in stature, form of skull, feature, and complexion, though considerable, seem variations of a secondary kind. It is not as if several races had formed each its proper type in its proper region, but as if the country had been peopled by migrating tribes of a ready-made race, who had only to spread and acclimatise themselves over both tropical and temperate zones, much as the European horses have done since the time of Columbus, and less perfectly the white men themselves. The race to which most anthropologists refer the native Americans is the Mongoloid of East Asia, who are capable of accommodating themselves to the extremest climates, and who by the form of skull, the light-brown skin, straight black hair, and black eyes, show considerable agreement with the American tribes. [Figs. 41 and 42] represent the wild hunting-tribes of North America in one of the finest forms now existing, the Colorado Indians, while in [Fig. 43] the Cauixana Indians may stand as examples of the rude and sluggish forest-men of Brazil. While tribes of America and Asia may thus be of one original stock, we must look cautiously at theories as to the ocean and island routes by which Asiatics may have migrated to people the New World. It is probable that man had appeared there, as in the Old World, in an earlier geological period than the present, so that the first kinship between the Mongols and the North American Indians may go back to a time when there was no ocean between them. What looks like later communication between the two continents, is that the stunted Eskimo with their narrow roof-topped skulls may be a branch of the Japanese stock, while there are signs of the comparatively civilized Mexicans and Peruvians having in some way received arts and ideas from Asiatic nations.
Fig. 41.—Colorado Indian (North America).
Fig. 42.—Colorado Indian (North America).
Fig. 43.—Cauixana Indians (South America).
We come last to the white men, whose nations have all through history been growing more and more dominant intellectually, morally, and politically on the earth. Though commonly spoken of as one variety of mankind, it is plain that they are not a single uniform race, but a varied and mixed population. It is a step toward classing them to separate them into two great divisions, the dark-whites and fair-whites (melanochroi, xanthochroi). Ancient portraits have come down to us of the dark-white nations, as Assyrians, Phœnicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans; and when beside these are placed moderns such as the Andalusians, and the dark Welshmen or Bretons, and people from the Caucasus, it will be evident that the resemblance running through all these can only be in broad and general characters. They have a dusky or brownish-white skin, black or deep brown eyes, black hair, mostly wavy or curly; their skulls vary much in proportions, though seldom extremely broad or narrow, while the profile is upright, the nose straight or aquiline, the lips less full than in other races. Rather for form’s sake than for a real type of the dark-whites, a group of Georgians are shown in [Fig. 44]. Opposite them [Fig. 45], a group of Swedes, somewhat better represents the fair-whites, whose transparent skin, flaxen hair, and blue eyes may be seen as well, though not as often, in England as in Scandinavia or North Germany. The earliest recorded appearance of fair-whites may be in the paintings where Egyptian artists represent with yellowish-white skin and blue eyes certain natives of North Africa, a district where remnants of blonde tribes are still known. These fair Libyans, as well as the fair red-haired people who appear about Syria, and are known to us as forming a type among the Jews, may perhaps be connected in race with the fair nations who were already settled over the north of Europe when the classic writers begin to give accounts of its barbarous inhabitants, from the Goths northward to the dwellers in Thule. The intermarriage of the dark and fair varieties which has gone on since these early times, has resulted in numberless varieties of brown-haired people, between fair and dark in complexion. But as to the origin and first home of the fair and dark races themselves, it is hard to form an opinion. Language does much toward tracing the early history of the white nations, but it does not clear up the difficulty of separating fair-whites from dark-whites. Both sorts have been living united by national language, as at this day German is spoken by the fair Hanoverian and the darker Austrian. Among Keltic people, the Scotch Highlanders often remind us of the tall red-haired Gauls described in classical history, but there are also passages which prove that smaller darker Kelts like the modern Welsh and Bretons existed then as well. As a help in clearing up this problem, which so affects our own ancestry, Huxley suggests that the fair-whites were the original stock, and that these crossing with the brown races of the far south may have given rise to the various kinds of dark-whites. However this may be, such mixture of the white and brown races seems indeed to have largely formed the population of countries where they meet. The Moors of North Africa, and many so-called Arabs who are darker than white men, may be thus accounted for. It is thus that in India millions who speak Hindu languages show by their tint that their race is mixed between that of the Aryan conquerors of the land and its darker indigenes. An instructive instance of this very combination is to be seen in the Gypsies, low-caste wanderers who found their way from India and spread over Europe not many centuries since. [Fig. 46], a Gypsy woman from Wallachia, is a favourable type of these latest incomers from the East, whose broken-down Hindu dialect shows that part of their ancestry comes from our Aryan forefathers, while their complexion, swarthiest in the population of our country, marks also descent belonging to a darker zone of the human species.
