Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/331

Rh a more or less pure condition, especially in the interior and more inaccessible portions of the islands, almost each of which shows special modifications of the type recognizable in details of structure. Taken altogether their chief physical distinction from the African negroes lies in the fact that the glabella and supra-orbital ridges are generally well developed in the males, whereas in Africans this region is usually smooth and flat. The nose, also, especially in the northern part of their geographical range, New Guinea, and the neighboring islands, is narrower (often mosorhine) and prominent. The cranium is generally higher and narrower. It is, however, possible to find African and Melanesian skulls quite alike in essential characters.

The now extinct inhabitants of Tasmania are probably pure but aberrant members of the Melanesian group, which have undergone a modification from the original type, not by mixture with other races, but in consequence of long isolation, during which special characters have gradually developed. Lying completely out of the track of all civilization and commerce, even of the most primitive kind, they were little liable to be subject to the influence of any other race, and there is in fact nothing among their characters which could be accounted for in this way, as they are intensely, even exaggeratedly, Negroid in the form of nose, projection of mouth, and size of teeth, typically so in character of hair, and aberrant chiefly in width of skull in the parietal region. A cross with any of the Polynesian or Malay races sufficiently strong to produce this would, in all probability, have also left some traces on other parts of their organization.

On the other hand, in many parts of the Melanesian region there ire distinct evidences of large admixture with Negrito, Malay, and Polynesian elements in varying proportions, producing numerous physical modifications. In many of the inhabitants of the great Island of New Guinea itself and of those lying around it this mixture can be traced. In the people of Micronesia in the north, and New Zealand in the south, though the Melanesian element is present, it is completely overlaid by the Polynesian, but there are probably few, if any, of the islands of the Pacific in which it does not form some factor in the composite character of the natives.

The inhabitants of the continent of Australia have long been a puzzle to ethnologists. Of Negroid complexion, features, and skeletal characters, yet without the characteristic frizzly hair, their position has been one of great difficulty to determine. They have, in fact, been a stumbling-block in the way of every system proposed. The solution, supported by many considerations too lengthy to enter into here, appears to lie in the supposition that they are not a distinct race at all, that is, not a homogeneous group formed by the gradual modification of one of the primitive stocks, but rather a cross between two already formed branches of these stocks. According to this view, Australia was originally peopled with frizzly-haired Melanesians, such