The Malay intellect is of a low order, and the race has never developed a native culture, their civilization being entirely due to foreign influences, chiefly Hindu and Arab.
Mongolian (mon-gō´li-än).—The second in Blumenbach’s classification of the races of mankind. The chief characteristics are broad cheekbones, low, retreating forehead, short and broad nose, and yellowish complexion. It included the Chinese, Japanese, Turks, Tartars, Indo-Chinese, Lapps, etc. The Mongolian and the Caucasian are the two largest races, or divisions, of mankind,—the latter being somewhat the larger because it includes the greater part of the population of India.
Finish girl of to-day—a descendent of Mongolian ancestors who settled in Europe centuries ago.
Just as the Caucasian race extends into southwestern and southern Asia, so the Mongolian race extends far into Europe, embracing not only the Lapps of Scandinavia, the Finns, Cossacks, and many other peoples of Russia, and the Turks of southern Europe, but even the Magyars of Hungary, the most advanced of all the Europeans of Mongolian origin. The main western branches of the Mongolians, although Europeanized in blood as well as in culture, still possess a Mongolian speech.
Brinton divides the Mongolian race into two great branches, the Sinitic and the Sibiric.
The word “Sinitic” is derived from the late Latin Sina, China. It comprises that branch of the Mongolian race of which the Chinese, Indo-Chinese, and Tibetan groups are the chief representatives.
The Sibiric branch of the Mongolian race comprises the Japanese, Arctic, Tungusic, Finnic, Tataric, and Mongolic groups, and therefore all the Mongolian peoples which have invaded Europe, such as the Finns, Lapps, Magyars, and Osmanlis or Turks.
Moor is a term applied to very different peoples of northwestern Africa. In Roman history it is applied to inhabitants of Mauretania (Morocco and Algeria), who were in part Phoenician colonists. In Spanish history the “Moors” and “Moriscos” were mainly Berbers rather than, as commonly supposed, Arabs. Today the word is wrongly applied to the Riffs of Morocco and to the town dwellers of Algeria and Tunis. The latter call themselves generally “Arabs,” although often in part of Berber blood. The Moors, in a stricter racial sense, are the mixed Trarza and other tribes on the western coast, from Morocco to the Senegal, mainly of nomadic habits. They are of mixed Berber, Arab, and often Negro blood. Many speak Arabic.
Negro.—The only negroes to whom practically all ethnologists are willing to apply the term are those inhabiting the central and western third of Africa, excluding even the Bantus, who occupy practically all Africa south of the Equator. The Bantus, well typified by the Zulu subdivision, are lighter in color than the true negroes, never sooty black, but of a reddish-brown. From the negroes proper of the Sudan have descended most American negroes.