Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/332

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

as those which still do, or did till the recent European invasion, dwell in the smaller islands which surround the north, east, and southern portions of the continent, but that a strong infusion of some other race, probably a low form of Caucasian Melanochroi, such as that which still inhabits the interior of the southern parts of India, has spread throughout the land from the northwest, and produced a modification of the physical characters, especially of the hair. This influence did not extend across Bass's Strait into Tasmania, where, as just said, the Melanesian element remained in its purity. It is more strongly marked in the northern and central parts of Australia than on many portions of the southern and western coasts, where the lowness of type and more curly hair, sometimes closely approaching to frizzly, show a stronger retention of the Melanesian element. If the evidence should prove sufficiently strong to establish this view of the origin of the Australian natives, it will no longer be correct to speak of a primitive Australian, or even Australoid, race or type, or look for traces of the former existence of such a race anywhere out of their own land. Proof of the origin of such a race is, however, very difficult if not impossible to obtain, and I know nothing to exclude the possibility of the Australians being mainly the direct descendants of a very primitive human type, from which the frizzly-haired negroes may be an offset. This character of hair must be a specialization, for it seems very unlikely that it was the attribute of the common ancestors of the human race.

D. The fourth branch of the Negroid race consists of the diminutive, round-headed people called Negritos, still found in a pure or unmixed state in the Andaman Islands, and forming a substratum of the population, though now greatly mixed with invading races, especially Malays, in the Philippines, and many of the islands of the Indo Malayan Archipelago, and perhaps of some parts of the southern portion of the mainland of Asia. They also probably contribute to the varied population of the great Island of Papua or New Guinea, where they appear to merge into the taller, longer-headed, and longer-nosed Melanesians proper. They show, in a very marked manner, some of the most striking anatomical peculiarities of the negro race, the frizzly hair, the proportions of the limbs, especially the humero-radial index, and the form of the pelvis; but they differ in many cranial and facial characters, both from the African negroes on the one hand, and the typical Oceanic negroes, or Melanesians, on the other, and form a very distinct and well-characterized group.

II. The principal groups that can be arranged around the Mongolian type are—

A. The Eskimo, who appear to be a branch of the typical North Asiatic Mongols, who in their wanderings northward and eastward across the American Continent, isolated almost as perfectly as an island population would be, hemmed in on one side by the eternal