Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/311

Rh circular Mongolian hair (a) hangs straight; the more curly European hair (b) has an oval or elliptical section; the woolly African hair (c) is more flattened; while the frizzy Papuan hair (d) is a yet more extreme example of the flattened ribbon-like kind. Not only the color and form of the hair, but its quantity, vary in different races.

That certain races are constitutionally fit, and others unfit, for certain climates, is a fact which the English have but too good reason to know. It is well known that races are not affected alike by certain diseases. While in equatorial Africa or the West Indies, the coast fever and yellow fever are so fatal or injurious to the new-come Europeans, the negroes, and even mulattoes, are almost untouched by this scourge of the white nations. On the other hand, we English look upon measles as a trifling complaint, and hear with astonishment of its being carried into Feejee, and there, aggravated, no doubt, by improper treatment, sweeping away the natives by thousands. It is plain that nations moving into a new climate, if they are to flourish, must become adapted in body to the new state of life. Fitness for a special climate, being matter of life or death to a race, must be reckoned among the chief of race-characters.

Travelers notice striking distinctions in the temper of races. There seems no difference of condition between the native Indian and the African negro in Brazil to make the brown man dull and sullen, while the black is overflowing with eagerness and gayety. So, in Europe, the unlikeness between the melancholy Russian peasant and the vivacious Italian can hardly depend altogether on climate and food and government. There seem to be in mankind inbred temperament and inbred capacity of mind. History points the great lesson that some races have marched on in civilization while others have stood still or fallen back, and we should partly look for an explanation of this in

differences of intellectual and moral powers between such tribes as the native Americans and Africans, and the old-world nations who overmatch and subdue them. In measuring the minds of the lower races, a good test is, how far their children are able to take a civilized education. The account generally given by European teachers who have had the children of lower races in their schools is that, though these