Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/324

308 As in all our preceding world maps, we have to do with the aboriginal and not the imported peoples. Our data for North America apply to the Indians alone, before the advent of either the whites or negroes. These latter depart in no wise physically from the types whence they were derived. It appears that most of Asia and both the Americas are quite uniformly straight-haired. At the other extreme stands Africa, and especially Papua and the archipelago to the southeast of it, which as far as the Fiji group is known as Melanesia, or the "black islands." This map strikingly corroborates the evidence presented by our other world maps, showing the distribution of the head form and the skin color. Generally speaking, the aphorism holds that the round-headed people are also round-haired. The black-skinned races are, on the other hand, generally long-headed and characterized by hair of an elongated oval in cross section. Physical anthropologists, to be sure, distinguish several subvarieties of this curly hair. Thus, among the Bushmen and Hottentots at the southern tip of Africa, the spirals are so tight that the hair aggregates in little nubbles over the scalp, leaving what were long supposed to be entirely bald spots between. This is known as the peppercorn type, from its resemblance to such grains scattered over the head. And in Melanesia the texture is not quite like that of the main body of the Africans; but for all practical purposes they may all be classed together.

The remaining tints upon our map denote the extension of the wavy textured hair, which is generally intermediate in cross section, varying from ribbonlike to nearly cylindrical shape. There are three separate subdivisions under this head. Two of these, the Polynesian and the Australian, are most certainly wavy-haired mongrels, derived from intermixture of the straight-haired Asiatic races with the extreme frizzled type of Melanesia. This latter is by all authorities regarded as the primitive occupant of the Pacific archipelago, and of Indonesia as well. Among the Malays, and such hybrids as the Japanese, the Asiatic type preponderates; in the Australian peoples the other element is more strongly represented. Tasmania is quite distinct from its neighboring continent. Isolation perhaps has kept it true to its primitive type. The Polynesians and Micronesians seem to be compounded of about equal proportions of each. Of course, all sorts of variations are common. The peoples of the Pacific are peculiarly aberrant in this respect. Some islands are characterized by quite lank and coarse-haired types; some have the frizzled hair stiffened just enough to make it stand on end, producing those surprising shocks familiar to us in our school-geography illustrations of the Fiji islanders.

What shall we say of the European races, the third of our