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.
II.
Next we have the Turanian (from tura, ‘swiftness of a horse’), the Mongol, the square or short-headed (brachikephalous), the traditionary, the yellow man. His face is flat, his nose deeply sunken between his prominent cheeks; his reasoning faculty is developed only to a certain degree. He has small, oblique eyes, the lines being turned upwards, expressing cunning and jocularity. His mouth is less powerful than that of the negro. He has broad shoulders, an expansive chest, thin and small bow legs, as if formed to use those of horses instead of his own; he is an excellent rider, but a slow though steady walker. He looks on nature with a nomadic shepherd’s eye, and not with that of a settled artist. He excels in technical ability, has great powers of imitation, can produce geometrical ornamentation of the most complicated and ingenious character, and a realistic imitation of flowers, butterflies, and birds, but has no sense for perspective and no talent for shading. He is incapable of drawing the human form. Sculpture of a higher kind is unknown to him, though he can execute perfectly marvellous carvings, which, though quaint in design and composition, are wanting in proportion and expression. Faithful to his nomadic traditions, and the lines of his head and face, his architectural constructions take an according form. Like his facial lines, the roofs of his houses are twisted upwards.
The amount of brain in the Turanian averages 83½ cubic inches, and his facial angle is 87½ degrees.