Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/468

 450 types we rise to the notion of general types, which are likewise only probabilities, going up gradually to historical, prehistorical, and Quaternary types, and, by inductive constitution, to primitive types. Hence the necessity of a classification of types; or, to use the current erroneous language, of races. Every anthropologist has his classification. M. Deniker in his, published in 1889, admitted thirty types; in the classification of our lectures and our Eléments d'anthropologie générale we enumerated nineteen, without concealing the existence of many gaps. This is all not very favorable to the idea of the unity of the human species. But it must not be forgotten that a number of these types are artificial, provisional, and, as we have said, simple mental views. Whether these were originally one or many types, the results are the same. At present all men are capable of unlimited crossing, and new types are in continual formation. If we would go up to the origin of things, we should have to put away all these secondary products and simplify more and more. We should thus come, in the first stage of our synthesis, to the conception of eight general types, viz.: A fundamental European blonde type, a Mediterraneo-Semitic, a brachycephalic Asiatic, a dolichocephalic Asiatic, an Americo-Polynesian type, a black type with curly hair, a brachycephalic negro, and a dolichocephalic negro type. But perhaps dolichocephaly and brachycephaly are only secondary differentiations that may be produced in all the types, as large and small stature may be too; the black man with curly hair may be only a cross.

Nothing is easier, in fact, than to conceive in the light of anatomy and physiology that all types of mankind can be reduced to three original types—the Europeo-Semitic, the Asiatico-American, and the negro; or to two—the white, which is differentiated into those of flat and of sharp faces, and the negro. A further reduction would be hazardous. But if we lost ourselves in the depth of the ages, we might conceive the negro as first born and giving birth in succession to the curly-haired Australian, to one of the brown forms with straight or waving hair, and finally to the blonde European.

Hence, the monogenistic system, or the doctrine of the unity of type and origin, and the polygenistic system, or the doctrine of plurality of type and origin, are equally tenable.

But, it may be said, prehistoric skulls and bones should assist us in our task. Only a little! With the single exception of the Neanderthal skull, which has a type of its own, all the few specimens which the prehistoric peoples have left us are obviously only duplicates of existing types, and those of Europeans and Americans. Of the ancient negro, Africa and Oceania, which were supposed to be the promised lands for primitive anthropology, have