Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 2 (1898).djvu/435

Rh our earliest ancestors; not altogether what we mean by "primitive man," but rather of the creature that gradually became less simian, and more and more human. Of this missing link we know absolutely nothing as to the colour of its—or perhaps we should say his—skin; neither do we of the colour of fossil Apes. As Dr. Büchner has remarked: "The Orang or Orang-outan which inhabits the Asiatic Archipelago is of a yellowish red colour and brachycephalous, or short-headed, like the Malays; whilst the Chimpanzee and the Gorilla, both of which are indigenous to Africa, are black and dolichocephalous, or long-headed, like the Negroes." There is also much truth in the statement of Winwood Keade, that many ethnologists discuss the question as though the original colour of mankind was white; " but the naked primeval men were probably dark, for white is a colour injurious to wild animals, and seldom if ever found in the fauna of the forest." Of fossil Apes we know more or less of the anatomical structure, but our conclusions as to colour can only be equivalent to our pronouncing the colour of a prehistoric man whose skull was found in Africa as black; of one found in Europe as necessarily white; or another discovered in America as red. That secret belongs entirely to the past, and its solution can only be suggested by induction. As De Quatrefages has remarked: "The first men who peopled the centre of human appearance must at first have differed from each other only in individual features." Their colour would have been uniform, either derived from their more brutish ancestors, or possibly, as their habits became less arboreal, a more assimilative colouration may have ensued to the soil on which they walked. Then, as migrations followed and the more plastic forms of these last evoluted children of nature reached centres of different geological conditions, we might imagine that again assimilative colouration played a part; and these incidents of early wanderings and colour absorption of the long, long ago, when the species was still clay in the hands of Nature, the potter, gradually became permanent,