Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/392

 376 belong to the perfected types. Some races have the same skulls very small, of about the same volume as the microcephalous skulls; for example, the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands and the Veddahs of Ceylon have been regarded as microcephalic. A more exact study has, however, shown a difference between them and the real microcephalic races. The head of an Andaman-islander or of a Veddah is very regular, only all its parts are a little smaller than among men of the ordinary races. Nanicephalic heads (dwarf), as I call them, have none of those characteristic anomalies that distinguish really microcephalic heads.

A single race, that of the Orang-Simaings and the Orang-Cekai of the peninsula of Malacca, still remains unstudied. The single traveler who has penetrated into the mountainous countries inhabited by them, the bold Russian, Miklukho Maklai, has ascertained that certain isolated individuals among Simaings are small and have curled hair. A new expedition has been sent into that country to study the anthropology of the Orang-Cekai, from which I have recently received a skull and a few locks of hair; the stock is really a black race with curly hair, the brachycephalous head of which is distinguished by very moderate interior volume, but it does not offer the most trifling sign of bestial development.

Thus we are repulsed at every line of the assault upon the human question. All the researches undertaken with the aim of finding continuity in progressive development have been without result. There exists no proanthropos, no man-monkey, and the "connecting link" remains a phantom.

Scientific anthropology begins with living races; and the first step in the construction of the doctrine of transformism will be the explanation of the way the human races have been formed, and of the means by which they have acquired their specific peculiarities while still preserving hereditary transmission. That is the future field of anthropological debate and investigation. But this field is outside of the limitations of our Congress. It is easy at first sight to suppose a dolichocephalous skull to be transformed into a brachycephalous skull, but still nobody has ever observed the transformation of a dolichocephalous race into a brachycephalous one, or vice versa, or of a negro race into an Aryan race.

Prehistoric anthropology should find methods of facilitating acquaintance with the types of ancient races and peoples, and of making possible the discovery of them among living men. It might add to that, if the occasion should present itself, data respecting strange individual cases, by the aid of which it is impossible to form a continuous line or constitute a genealogical tree, but which should be kept in the scientific lumber-room till