EARLIEST PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH SERPENTS AND HORSES' HEADS.
From Grotto of Les Eyzies. Reindeer Period.
REINDEER FEEDING.
From Grotto of Thayngen, near Schaffhausen, Switzerland.
On what are the distinctions of the human race founded? Mainly on colour, stature, hair, and on the anatomical character of skulls and skeletons. These are wonderfully persistent, and have been so since historical times, intermediate characters only appearing where there has been intercrossing between different races. But the primitive types have continued unchanged, and no one has ever seen a white race of Negroes, or a black one of Europeans. And this has certainly been the case during the historical period, or for at least 7000 years, for the paintings on old Egyptian tombs show us the types of the Negro, the Libyan, the Syrian, and the Copt as distinct as at the present day, and the Negroes especially, with their black colour, long heads, projecting muzzles, and woolly hair growing in separate tufts, might pass for typical photographs of the African Negro of the nineteenth century.
Of these indications of race we cannot hope to meet with any of the former class in Quaternary gravel or caves. We have to trust to the anatomical character to be drawn from skulls and skeletons, of which it may be inferred, as a matter of course, that they will be few and scanty, and will become constantly fewer and more imperfect as we ascend the stream of time to earlier periods. It must be remembered also that even these scanty specimens of early man are confined almost entirely to one comparatively small portion of the earth, that of Europe, and that we have hardly a single palæolithic skull or skeleton of the black, the yellow, the olive, the copper-coloured, or other typical race into which the population of the earth is actually divided.