Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/605

Rh tribes of America have average indices between 79 and 83. Many American peoples among whom customs of cranial deformation prevail are able artificially to raise their indices to 90 or even 95; but such monstrosities should be excluded for the present, since we are studying normal types of man alone. Translated into words, this means that the American Indians should all be classified together as, in a sense, a secondary race.

With them we may place the great group of men which inhabits the islands of the Pacific. These people manifest even clearer than do the American Indians that they are an intermediate type. They are, however, more unstable as a race, especially



lacking homogeneity. They seem to be compounded of the Asiatic and Melanesian primary racial elements in varying proportions. It is the most discouraging place in the world to measure types of head, because of their extreme variability. We shall have occasion shortly to compare certain of their characteristics other than the head form with those of the people of Europe. This we shall do in the attempt to discover whether these last are also a secondary race, or whether they are entitled to a different place in the human species. We shall then see that one can not study Europe quite by itself without gaining thereby an entirely false idea of its human history.

Before proceeding to discuss the place which Europe occupies in our racial series, it may be interesting to point out certain curious parallelisms between the geographical localization of the several types of head form and the natural distribution of the