Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/303



NTHROPOLOGY finds race-differences most clearly in stature and proportions of limbs, conformation of the skull and the brain within, characters of features, skin, eyes, and hair, peculiarities of constitution, and mental and moral temperament.

In comparing races as to their stature, we concern ourselves not with the tallest or shortest men of each tribe, but with the ordinary or average-sized men who may be taken as fair representatives of their whole tribe. The difference of general stature is well shown where a tall and a short people come together in one district. Thus, in Australia the average English colonist of five feet eight inches looks clear over the heads of the five feet four inch Chinese laborers. Still more in Sweden does the Swede of five feet seven inches tower over the stunted Lapps, whose average measure is not much over five feet. Among the tallest of mankind are the Patagonians, who seemed a race of giants to the Europeans who first watched them striding along their cliffs draped in their skin cloaks; it was even declared that the heads of Magalhaens's men hardly reached the waist of the first Patagonian they met. Modern travelers find, on measuring them, that they really often reach six feet four inches, their mean height being about five feet eleven inches—three or four inches taller than average Englishmen. The shortest of mankind are the Bushmen and related tribes in South Africa, with an average height not far exceeding four feet six inches. A fair contrast between the tallest and shortest races of mankind may be seen in Fig. 1, where a Patagonian is drawn side by side with a