Critiques and Addresses

by Thomas Henry Huxley

[Footnote 1: Skulls, the transverse diameter of which is more than eight-tenths the long diameter, are short; those which have the transverse diameter less than eight-tenths the longitudinal, are long.]

LEIOTRICHI. ULOTRICHI.
______________________________ ____________________________
/ \ / \
Dolichocephali. Brachycephali. Dolichocephali. Brachycephali.
Leucous.
…. Xanthochroi ….
Leucomelanous.
…. Melanochroi ….
Xanthomelanous.
Esquimaux. Mongolians. Bushmen.
Amphinesians.
Americans.
Melanous.
Australians. Negroes. Mincopies(?)
Negritos

NOTE: The names of the stocks known only since the fifteenth century are put into italics. If the "Skrälings" of the Norse discoverers of America were Esquimaux, Europeans became acquainted with the latter six or seven centuries earlier.

It is curious to observe that almost all the woolly-headed people are also long-headed; while among the straight-haired nations broad heads preponderate, and only two stocks, the Esquimaux and the Australians, are exclusively long-headed.

One of the acutest and most original of ethnologists, Desmoulins, originated the idea, which has subsequently been fully developed by Agassiz, that the distribution of the persistent modifications of man is governed by the same laws as that of other animals, and that both fall into the same great distributional provinces. Thus, Australia; America, south of Mexico; the Arctic regions; Europe, Syria, Arabia, and North Africa, taken together, are each regions eminently characterized by the nature of their animal and vegetable populations, and each, as we have seen, has its peculiar and characteristic form of man. But it may be doubted whether the parallel thus drawn will hold good strictly, and in all cases. The Tasmanian Fauna and Flora are essentially Australian, and the like is true to a less extent of many, if not of all, the Papuan islands; but the Negritos who inhabit these islands are strikingly different from the Australians. Again, the differences between the Mongolians and the Xanthochroi are out of all proportion greater than those between the Faunae and Florae of Central and Eastern Asia. But whatever the difficulties in the way of the detailed application of this comparison of the distribution of men with that of animals, it is well worthy of being borne in mind, and carried as far as it will go.

Apart from all speculation, a very curious fact regarding the distribution of the persistent modifications of mankind becomes apparent on inspecting an Ethnological chart, projected in such a manner that the Pacific Ocean occupies its centre. Such a chart exhibits an Australian area occupied by dark smooth-haired people, separated by an incomplete inner zone of dark woolly-haired Negritos and Negroes, from an outer zone of comparatively pale and smooth-haired men, occupying the Americas, and nearly all Asia and North Africa.

Such is a brief sketch of the characters and distribution of the persistent modifications, or stocks, of mankind at the present day. If we seek for direct evidence of how long this state of things has lasted, we shall find little enough, and that little far from satisfactory. Of the eleven different stocks enumerated, seven have been known to us for less than 400 years; and of these seven not one possessed a fragment of written history at the time it came into contact with European civilization. The other four—the Negroes, Mongolians, Xanthochroi, and Melanochroi—have always existed in some of the localities in which they are now found, nor do the negroes ever seem to have voluntarily travelled beyond the limits of their present area. But ancient history is in a great measure the record of the mutual encroachments of the other three stocks.

On the whole, however, it is wonderful how little change has been effected by these mutual invasions and intermixtures. As at the present time, so at the dawn of history, the Melanochroi fringed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; the Xanthochroi occupied most of Central and Eastern Europe, and much of Western and Central Asia; while Mongolians held the extreme east of the Old World. So far as history teaches us, the populations of Europe, Asia, and Africa were, twenty centuries ago, just what they are now, in their broad features and general distribution.

The evidence yielded by Archaeology is not very definite, but, so far as it goes, it is to much the same effect. The mound builders of Central America seem to have had the characteristic short and broad head of the modern inhabitants of that continent. The tumuli and tombs of Ancient Scandinavia, of pre-Roman Britain, of Gaul, of Switzerland, reveal two types of skull—a broad and a long—of which, in Scandinavia, the broad seems to have belonged to the older stock, while the reverse was probably the case in Britain, and certainly in Switzerland. It has been assumed that the broad-skulled people of ancient Scandinavia were Lapps; but there is no proof of the fact, and they may have been, like the broad-skulled Swiss and Germans, Xanthochroi. One of the greatest of ethnological difficulties is to know where the modern Swedes, Norsemen, and Saxons got their long heads, as all their neighbours, Fins, Lapps, Slavonians, and South Germans, are broad-headed. Again, who were the small-handed, long-headed people of the "bronze epoch," and what has become of the infusion of their blood among the Xanthochroi?

At present Palaeontology yields no safe data to the ethnologist. We know absolutely nothing of the ethnological characters of the men of Abbeville and Hoxne; but must be content with the demonstration, in itself of immense value, that Man existed in Western Europe when its physical condition was widely different from what it is now, and when animals existed, which, though they belong to what is, properly speaking, the present order of things, have long been extinct. Beyond the limits of a fraction of Europe, Palaeontology tells us nothing of man or of his works.