Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/314

300 uncivilized tribes, in whose food and way of life there is little to cause difference between one man and another, and who have lived together and intermarried for many generations. Thus Fig. 9, taken from a photograph of a party of Caribs, is remarkable for the close likeness running through all. In such a nation the race-type is peculiarly easy to make out. It is by no means always thus easy to represent a whole population. To see how difficult it may be, one has only to look at an English crowd, with its endless diversity. But, to get a view of the problem of human varieties, it is best to attend to the simplest cases first, looking at some uniform and well-marked race, and asking what in the course of ages may happen to it.

The first thing to be noticed is its power of lasting. Where a people lives on in its own district, without too much change in habits, or mixture with other nations, there seems no reason to expect its type to alter. The Egyptian monuments show good instances of this permanence. Indeed, the ancient Egyptian race, who built the Pyramids, and whose life and toil are pictured on the walls of the tombs, are with little change still represented by the fellahs of the villages, who carry on the old labor under new tax-gatherers. Thus, too, the Ethiopians on the early Egyptian bass-reliefs may have their counterparts picked out still among the White Nile tribes, while we recognize in the figures of Phœnician or Israelite captives the familiar Jewish profile of our own day. Thus there is proof that a race may keep its special characters plainly recognizable for over thirty centuries, or a hundred generations. And this permanence of type may more or less remain when the race migrates far from its early home, as when African negroes



are carried into America, or Israelites naturalize themselves from Archangel to Singapore. Where marked change has taken place in the appearance of a nation, the cause of this change must be sought in intermarriage with foreigners, or altered conditions of life, or both. The result of intermarriage or crossing of races is familiar to all