Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/606

586 flora and fauna of the earth. Where, as in Africa and Australia, there is marked individuality in the lower forms of life, there is also to be found an extreme type of the human species. Where, on the other hand, realms, like the Oriental one which covers southeastern Asia and the Malay Archipelago, have drawn upon the north and the south alike for both their flora and fauna, several types of man have also immigrated and crossed with one another. Often the dividing lines between distinct realms for varieties of man, animal, and plant coincide quite exactly. The Sahara Desert, once a sea, and not the present Mediterranean, as we shall show, divides the true negro from the European, as it does the Ethiopian zoölogical and botanical realm from its neighbor. Thus the Berber of Tunis, on page 580, is properly placed in our series of European types. The Andes, the Rocky Mountains, and the Himalayas, divide types of all forms of life alike, including man. Even that remarkable line which Alfred Russel Wallace so vividly describes in Island Life, which divides the truly insular fauna and flora from those of the continent of Asia, is duplicated among men near by. The sharp division line for plants and animals between Bali and Lombok we have shown upon the map. It is but a short distance farther east, between Timor and Flores, where we suddenly pass from the broad-headed, straight-haired Asiatic Malay to the long-headed and frizzled Melanesian savage—to the group which includes the Papuans of New Guinea and the Australian.

Following out this study of man in his natural migrations just as we study the lower animals, it can be shown that the differences in geographical localization between the human and other forms of life are merely of degree. The whole matter is reducible at bottom to terms of physical geography, producing areas of characterization. Where great changes in the environment occur, where oceans or mountain chains divide, or where river systems unite geographical areas, we discover corresponding effects upon the distribution of human as of other animal types. This is not because the environment has directly generated those peculiarities in each instance; certainly no such result can be shown in respect of the head form. It is because the several varieties of man or other mammals have been able to preserve their individuality through geographical isolation from intermixture, or contrariwise, as the case may be, have merged it in a conglomerate whole compounded of all immigrant types alike. In this sense man in his physical constitution is almost as much a creature of environment as the lower orders of life. Even in Europe he has not yet