Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/775

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ETHNOLOGY
759

the Foolahs moved further west, and inhabit now a broad district south of the western Sahara, between the Soodanese in the north and the Nigritians in the south. The Nubians and Foolahs are generally classified either with the negroes or with the Hamitic races, and accordingly as Mediterraneans; but their peculiarities are great enough to constitute them a distinct species. The color of the skin is a yellow-brown or red-brown, and but seldom dark brown or black. The hair is not woolly, but generally curly, though frequently quite smooth; it is either dark brown or black. The growth of the beard is much fuller than with the negroes. The oval face gives them a Mediterranean type. The forehead is high and broad; the nose prominent and not flat; the lips are not puffy; and the languages spoken by the Nubian races have no connection with the tongues of the negroes proper. (See Arnaud d'Abbadie, De l'Afrique centrale, ou voyage de S. A. Mohammed Said Pacha dans les provinces du Soudan, Paris, 1857; and Antoine d'Abbadie, Géodésie d'Éthiopie, Paris, 1860-'63, which contains a number of Nubian vocabularies.)—The Mediterraneans have always been considered the best developed and most cultivated species. They were formerly classified as Caucasians, but the term was abandoned on account of the insignificance of the proper Caucasian branch, and Mediterranean was substituted because the most important races of this species flourished first on the shores of that sea. The Mediterraneans are now scattered over the whole world, and as a species they have no equal physically and mentally. The skin is as a rule of a light color, but appears in all tinges from a pure white or a ruddy white, through yellow and yellow brown, to dark and even black brown. The hair is generally rich in growth, and more or less curly, and the beard is fuller than with any other species. The skull is rather broad, and medium-sized heads are more common than others. No other species has an equally symmetrical development of the body. The languages of the Mediterranean races have not yet been retraced to a single primitive tongue; and at the present stage of philology four distinct languages are accepted as the earliest known antecedents of the languages now spoken. In harmony with this result, it is still necessary to divide the Mediterranean species into four races, which are only connected by the roots. Two of these races, the Basques and the Caucasians, are represented by only very small remnants. The Basques formerly inhabited the whole of Spain and the south of France, but are now reduced to about 800,000, dwelling near the northern coast of Spain, at the foot of the bay of Biscay, and a few on the French frontier. (See Basques.) The remnants of the Caucasian race are now confined to the Caucasian highlands. Their language, as well as that of the Basques, has no similarity with either the Aryan or the Semitic tongues. (Consult Cuno, Forschungen im Gebiete der alten Völkerkunde, Berlin 1871 et seq.). It has been attempted to prove that the Semitic and Aryan languages come from one common stock, as by Delitzsch in his Studien über indo-germanisch-semitische Wurzelverwandschaft (Leipsic, 1873); but the evidence is not quite sufficient. The two races must have separated at a very remote period. The Semitic race divided very early into the Egyptian and the Arabian branch. The Egyptians or Africans, also called Dyssemites, are by some entirely separated from the Semites, with the designation of Hamites. They embrace the ancient population of Egypt; the large group of Berbers who now inhabit the whole of North Africa, and formerly inhabited also the Canary islands; and finally the group of Ethiopians, Bedshas, Gallas, Danakils, Somauli, and other tribes, who people the coastland of N. E. Africa as far as the equator. The Arabian or Asiatic branch, also called Eusemites, and sometimes designated as Semites proper, embraces the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula, and the highly cultivated group of Hebrews or Jews, and Arameans or Syrians and Chaldeans. The Himyarites, an offshot of the South Arabians, have peopled Abyssinia and pushed into the adjacent countries. (See Renan, Histoire comparée des langues sémitiques, 2d ed., Paris, 1858).—The Indo-European race has surpassed all other races in intellectual development, and separated like the Semites at a very early period into two branches: the Aryo-Romanic and the Slavo-Germanic. The former produced the Aryans in the narrower sense, or Hindoos and Iranians, and the Græco-Romans, comprising the Greeks and Itali, and according to many authorities the Albanese and Celts; the latter the Slavs and Letts, with the Russian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Serb, and Baltic stems, and the Germanic nations, comprising Scandinavians, Germans, Netherlanders, and Anglo-Saxons. (See Fr. Spiegel, Das Urland der Indogermanen, Leipsic, 1871, and Eranische Alterthumskunde: Geographie, Ethnographie und älteste Geschichte, Leipsic, 1871 et seq.).—On the accompanying ethnological chart are shown the supposititious migrations and distribution of the human race from a continent now sunk under the level of the Indian ocean, to which Sclater has given the name of Lemuria. The cradle of the race is not known, and all the locations assigned to it are only hypothetical. Those ethnologists who give a plural origin to mankind account for the present distribution of the races by tracing their migrations to several starting points or primitive homes. The majority of ethnologists adopt, however, the monophyletic hypothesis, and regard the southern part of Asia as the birthplace of man, placing it either in the highlands of the Himalayas, or near the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes, or between the Euphrates and Tigris, or in the southern part of Arabia,