Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/330

318 lighter in color, having a larger cranial capacity, less marked prognathism, and smaller teeth. Some of these changes may possibly be due to crossing into the next race.

B. The Hottentots and Bushmen form a very distinct modification of the negro race. They formerly inhabited a much larger district than at present; but, encroached upon by the Bantu from the north, and the Dutch and English from the south, they are now greatly diminished, and indeed threatened with extinction. The Hottentots especially are much mixed with other races, and, under the influence of a civilization which has done little to improve their moral condition, they have lost most of their distinctive peculiarities. When purebred they are of moderate stature, have a yellowish-brown complexion, with very frizzly hair, which, being less abundant than that of the ordinary negro, has the appearance of growing in separate tufts. The forehead and chin are narrow, and the cheek-bones wide, giving a lozenge-shape to the whole face. The nose is very flat, and the lips prominent. In their anatomical peculiarities, and almost everything except size, the Bushmen agree with the Hottentots; they have, however, some special characters, for while they are the most platyrhine of races, the prognathism so characteristic of the negro type is nearly absent. This, however, may be the retention of an infantile character so often found in races of diminutive stature, as it is in all the smaller species of a natural group of animals. The cranium of a Bushman, taken altogether, is one of the best marked of any race, and could not be mistaken for that of any other race. Their relation to the Hottentots, however, appears to be that of a stunted and outcast branch, living the lives of the most degraded of savages among the rocky caves and mountains of the land of which the comparatively civilized and pastoral Hottentots inhabited the plains.

Perhaps the Negrillos of Hamy, certain diminutive, round-headed people of Central and Western Equatorial Africa, may represent a distinct branch of the negro race, but their numbers are few, and they are very much mixed with the true negroes in the districts in which they are found. They form the only exceptions to the general dolichocephaly of the African branch of the negro race.

C. Oceanic Negroes or Melanesians.—These include the Papuans of New Guinea and the majority of the inhabitants of the islands of the Western Pacific, and form also a substratum of the population, greatly mixed with other races, of regions extending far beyond the present center of their area of distribution.

They are represented, in what may be called a hypertypical form, by the extremely dolichocephalic Kai Colos, or mountaineers of the interior of the Feejee Islands, although the coast population of the same group have lost their distinctive characters by crossing. In many parts of New Guinea and the great chain of islands extending eastward and southward ending with New Caledonia, they are found in