Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/766

746 in the mountains of India and Indo-China, and in the Malay Peninsula. The race is nearly extinct in the Sunda Islands, but it seems to appear again in Timor; and a head from that island, in the collection of the museum, reproduces, apart from some details of the facial bony structure, all the characteristics of the Mincopie heads. An elegantly carved skull from Borneo, belonging to the Museum of Lyons, also presents the same traits (Fig. 1).

The detailed examination of twelve skulls from the interior of New



Guinea, Rawak, Boni, the Island of Toud, and Amberbaki, has allowed the authors to recognize in those different points the existence of an intermediate race between the Negritos and the Papuans, which they have, therefore, designated as the Negrito-Papuan race. The skulls of this intermediate type (Fig. 4) are slightly elongated, with their mean index descending to 80·15, while the facial index rises to 67·17, and the maxillary prognathism is much more sharply defined than among the Negritos. Some of these heads have been artificially deformed.

The Negrito-Papuan race forms, in some respects, a transition between the Negritos proper and the Tasmanians. The description given of the last race, which is now extinct, is based on the study of numerous skulls in the collections of the Museums of Paris, London, Shelton, etc., and other authentic sources of information. The Tasmanians were differentiated from other oceanic negroes by a number of characteristics, and the study of their skulls enables us to make of them a special race, remarkably homogeneous, notwithstanding the differences which prevailed in the languages of the several tribes.

The index of the Tasmanian skull varied from 77·10 among the southern tribes to 76·34 among the northern tribes. Its mean capacity, 1,420 centimetres in men's skulls, was notably superior to that of negro skulls in general. It presented a special form, a kind of keel-shape,