Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/333

Rh polar ice, and on the other by hostile tribes of American Indians, with which they rarely if ever mingled, have gradually developed characters most of which are strongly expressed modifications of those seen in their allies who still remain on the western side of Behring Strait. Every special characteristic which distinguishes a Japanese from the average of mankind is seen in the Eskimo in an exaggerated degree, so that there can be no doubt about their being derived from the same stock. It has also been shown that these special characteristics gradually increase from west to east, and arc seen in their greatest perfection in the inhabitants of Greenland; at all events, in those where no crossing with the Danes has taken place. Such scanty remains as have yet been discovered of the early inhabitants of Europe present no structural affinities to the Eskimo, although it is not unlikely that similar external conditions may have led them to adopt similar modes of life. In fact, the Eskimo are such an intensely specialized race, perhaps the most specialized of any in existence, that it is probable that they are of comparatively late origin, and were not as a race contemporaries with the men whose rude flint tools found in our drifts excite so much interest and speculation as to the makers, who have been sometimes, though with little evidence to justify such an assumption, reputed to be the ancestors of the present inhabitants of the northernmost parts of America.

B. The typical Mongolian races constitute the present population of Northern and Central Asia. They are not very distinctly, but still conveniently for descriptive purposes, divided into two groups, the Northern and the Southern.

a. The former, or Mongolo-Altaic group, are united by the affinities of their language. These people, from the cradle of their race in the great central plateau of Asia, have at various times poured out their hordes upon the lands lying to the west, and have penetrated almost to the heart of Europe. The Finns, the Magyars, and the Turks, are each the descendants of one of these waves of incursion, but they have for so many generations intermingled with the peoples through whom they have passed in their migrations, or have found in the countries in which they have ultimately settled, that their original physical characters have been completely modified. Even the Lapps, that diminutive tribe of nomads inhabiting the most northern parts of Europe, supposed to be of Mongolian descent, show so little of the special attributes of that branch, that it is difficult to assign them a place in it in a classification based upon physical characters. The Japanese are said by their language to be allied rather to the Northern than to the following branch of the Mongolian stock.

b. The Southern Mongolian group, divided from the former chiefly by language and habits of life, includes the greater part of the population of China, Thibet, Burmah, and Siam.

C. The next great division of Alongoloid people is the Malay,