Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/36

32 along the lower Zambesi river. Here range or here are located the villages of the unnumbered hordes of blacks that occupy the lowest position in the scale of evolution of the genus Homo. Among them are the relatives of many of the negroes in the United States, and indeed large numbers of the latter are no further removed from the most degraded standard of savagery than they are. Typical representatives of these true negroes anywhere are markedly uniform with respect to their moral and physical characters. More so in fact than any other people of whatever nationality they may be. For this reason they offer us admirable material for comparison, morally, socially, and morphologically, with not only the higher forms of existing apes and their allies, but also with human races standing in the evolutionary scale above them.

Taking up first some of his external characters it will be seen that the hair is short, black and frizzly, in fact distinctly woolly. A single hair on section is elliptical or quite flat. In this particular negroes differ as compared with the simians, the latter having coats of true hair, and not wool as on the heads and other parts of the former. Keane states that P. U. Brown in his Classification of Mankind by the Hair "shows conclusively that, unlike true hair and like true wool, the negro hair is flat, issues from the epidermis at a right angle, is spirally twisted or crisped, has no central duct, the coloring matter being disseminated through the cortex and intermediate fibres, while the cortex itself is covered with numerous rough, pointed filaments adhering loosely to the shaft; lastly the negro pile will felt, like wool, whereas true hair cannot be felted. Observing that the negro domain is also the habitat of