Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/353

, more or less erect but with a slouching gait, black-faced and whiskered, with prominent prognathous muzzle, and large, prominent canine teeth," whose "forehead was, no doubt, low and retreating, with bony bosses underlying shaggy eyebrows, which gave him a fierce expression, something like that of a gorilla"; and that such a creature existed in far-off prehistoric times Mr. Allen considers "an inevitable corollary from the general principles of evolution." "We may have some notion of what such a rough-cast of humanity would look like from the ideal representation of the Neanderthal man which forms the frontispiece to Mr. J. P. McLean's "Manual of the Antiquity of Man." But, whatever may have been the character of the early type, or however the subsequent divergence from it may have arisen, it is sufficiently established that, between the third and second millennium before the Christian era, the several races—black, brown, yellow, and white—had assumed the distinguishing marks by which they are still known. And, no sooner do we meet with evidence of racial diversity, than we begin to discover indications of race intermixture. The ancient Egyptians, who furnish us with such interesting examples of the human varieties of their time, were themselves a people of mixed blood. Nor in that respect were they singular. If, starting from that meeting-place of nations and tongues, the Nile Delta, we traverse the adjacent continents to their utmost limits, everywhere on the route, from Aino-peopled Japan to the Pillars of Hercules, we shall be confronted by the testimonies of interfusion of blood. Even races that seem most homogeneous, like the Chinese, or that have taken pride in avoiding the taint of alien mixture, like the Aryan Hindoos, or, like the Israelites, deemed themselves interdicted by the Divine command from intercourse with foreigners, have been proved beyond a doubt to be of composite origin. To deal separately with those various families of mankind as the dawn of history discloses them to us, or as the centuries of its short range have left them, would take up much time. The general result is, however, well set forth in a passage which I may be permitted to quote from "The Human Species" of M. de Quatrefages. "In China, and especially in Japan," says that distinguished ethnologist, "the white allophylian blood is mixed with the yellow blood in different proportions; the white Semitic blood has penetrated into the heart of Africa; the negro and Houzouana types have mutually penetrated each other and produced all the Caffre populations situated west of the Zooloos of Arabian origin; the Malay races are the result of the amalgamation, in different proportions, of whites, yellows, and blacks; the Malays proper, far from constituting a species, as polygenists consider them, are only one population, in which, under the influence of Islamism, these various elements have been more completely fused. I have