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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography," Daniel G. Brinton delivers a comprehensive examination of human diversity, linking ethnographic studies with anthropological insights. Employing a clear and engaging literary style, Brinton navigates through various racial classifications, cultural practices, and social constructs, ultimately challenging the prevailing racial hierarchies of his time. Grounded in the burgeoning field of scientific ethnography during the late 19th century, the work seeks not only to catalog diverse human experiences but also to advocate for a more nuanced understanding of cultural complexity. Daniel G. Brinton, a prominent American physician and anthropologist, was well-versed in the scientific trends and socio-political discourses of his era. His background in medicine and keen interest in Native American cultures propelled him to explore the intricate tapestry of human societies. Brinton's commitment to empirical observation and a more egalitarian perspective on race reflects his progressive stance against contemporary ethnocentric ideologies, making his work an essential contribution to the nascent discipline of anthropology. This book is highly recommended for those interested in the foundations of ethnographic studies, and it offers invaluable insights into the intersection of race, culture, and science. Brinton's thoughtful perspective challenges readers to reconsider their understandings of human diversity, making it a crucial read for scholars, students, and culturally curious individuals alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography
Table of Contents
Introduction
Races and Peoples wrestles with humanity’s urge to classify itself while revealing the limits and consequences of the categories we create. Daniel G. Brinton presents a work grounded in the intellectual confidence of his era, assembling lectures that seek to give ethnography the clarity, method, and authority of a science. Readers encounter a text that traces broad patterns across human groups, aiming for system and coherence. What emerges at the outset is both a promise and a tension: the promise of comprehensive explanation, and the tension of whether any scheme can encompass the complexity of human diversity without distortion.
This book is a work of nineteenth-century nonfiction, framed as lectures on ethnography by the American scholar Daniel G. Brinton and published in the late nineteenth century. Positioned at the intersection of anthropology, linguistics, and what was then called ethnology, it reflects a time when the study of peoples aspired to rigorous classification modeled on the natural sciences. The lecture format shapes its organization and cadence, favoring definition, comparison, and synthesis. As a document of its period, it situates readers within an academic setting where sweeping generalizations were common and the authority of scientific discourse was expanding into the study of culture.
As a reading experience, Races and Peoples offers methodical exposition rather than narrative, moving through arguments that combine physical description, linguistic comparison, and cultural observation. Brinton’s voice is formal and didactic, designed to persuade by accumulation of examples and the laying out of taxonomies. The mood is analytic and assured, emphasizing clarity and system over anecdote. While the lectures are accessible in tone, they presuppose an audience interested in grand summaries and organizing frameworks. The result is an encyclopedic approach that seeks to map the human world from a lecture hall podium, transmitting both confidence and the constraints of that vantage.
Key themes include the classification of human diversity, the search for stable criteria to distinguish groups, and the belief that language, physical traits, and customs can be coordinated into coherent accounts of origins and relationships. The lectures dwell on method—what counts as evidence, how to compare, how to arrange—and they regularly return to questions of kinship between peoples, diffusion of traits, and historical development. Brinton’s framework illustrates the period’s aspiration to unify disparate materials under one scientific rubric. Readers encounter the mechanics of typology as it was practiced then, along with the intellectual appeal such order promised to scholars and audiences alike.
Contemporary readers will recognize that many assumptions embedded in this work—especially biologized notions of race and hierarchical ranking—are now thoroughly discredited. The book stands as a primary source for the history of anthropology and ethnology, revealing how the language of science was used to naturalize categories that modern scholarship has dismantled. It invites careful, critical reading: attention to terminology, awareness of omissions, and scrutiny of the ways evidence is marshaled to support sweeping claims. Precisely because it is shaped by its era’s limits, it illuminates how disciplines evolve, and how intellectual authority can both clarify and obscure human complexity.
Races and Peoples matters today as a touchstone for examining how knowledge is produced, validated, and contested. It raises enduring questions: What counts as a meaningful human category? How do power and perspective guide the selection of evidence? Where do ethical responsibilities intersect with scholarly ambition? Engaging this text can sharpen critical skills, encourage reflection on methodological bias, and inform current conversations about race, culture, and representation. For students and general readers alike, it provides a historical baseline against which to measure shifts in concepts, methods, and values across the human sciences and in public discourse.
Approached as a historical document rather than a contemporary guide, the book rewards readers who pair it with modern anthropology, genetics, and critical theory to contextualize and correct its claims. It offers a vocabulary and a set of arguments that can be tested against present-day research, revealing both continuities and ruptures in the study of human diversity. Reading it in this way fosters intellectual humility and equips readers to spot the pitfalls of sweeping classification. Brinton’s lectures thus become a lens on the past and a prompt for present inquiry, encouraging a reflective, informed engagement with how we describe and understand one another.
Synopsis
Daniel G. Brinton’s Races and Peoples presents a sequence of lectures outlining a nineteenth-century program for a science of ethnography. He defines ethnography and ethnology, distinguishes their aims, and explains how they draw evidence from anatomy, linguistics, archaeology, and comparative cultural study. Setting a systematic tone, he proposes that human diversity can be measured and classified through consistent methods, coordinated across disciplines. The opening emphasizes careful observation, the collection of standardized data, and the use of historical and geographic context. Brinton’s purpose is to assemble a coherent framework that accounts for the distribution of peoples and the patterns that connect their physical and cultural traits.
Early chapters address whether humanity constitutes a single species or multiple origins. Brinton surveys arguments about monogenesis and polygenesis, weighing physiological, reproductive, and morphological evidence. He considers how interbreeding, fertility, and the plasticity of traits over time bear on classification. The discussion separates permanent characteristics from those shaped by environment and habit, clarifying the categories of species, race, and variety as used by contemporary science. He emphasizes that clear definitions are essential before proceeding to group populations. This establishes the logical foundation for later sections, where he compares different lines of inquiry to identify consistent markers of relationship among peoples.
Brinton then turns to physical anthropology, describing the measurement of bodies as an ethnographic tool. He reviews cranial indices, stature, proportions, pigmentation, hair form, and other features, alongside methods for collecting and interpreting such data. Attention is given to averages, variation within groups, and the need for large, representative samples. He notes how sex, age, nutrition, and climate influence observed traits, urging caution in drawing conclusions from limited sets. The analysis aims to identify stable trends without overstating their explanatory power. These chapters present somatology as a necessary, but not sufficient, component of a broader science of human classification.
Language occupies a central place in Brinton’s method. He differentiates between morphological typologies and genealogical relationships, favoring evidence of historical descent and shared innovations over superficial structural similarities. The lectures outline how vocabularies, phonetics, and grammar can reveal lines of connection, while also warning that borrowing and convergence can mislead. He explains principles for establishing language families, distinguishing core from peripheral features, and mapping linguistic boundaries. Brinton argues that language, when combined with physical indices and cultural records, offers a powerful means to trace migrations and contacts. He underscores that linguistic evidence reflects history of communication as much as descent.
Cultural data provide a third pillar. Brinton surveys material culture, social institutions, religion, and myth as comparative evidence, proposing that patterns of tools, rites, and narratives can indicate shared origins or prolonged contact. He discusses theories of cultural stages and progress, alongside diffusion and independent invention, and suggests criteria for distinguishing them. Archaeological remains and historical documents supplement living traditions, forming a continuum of sources. The approach seeks converging lines of proof, where language, physique, and culture mutually support conclusions. This multifunctional method is presented as the most reliable route to reconstructing the spread, divergence, and interaction of human groups.
Building on these methods, Brinton proposes a classification of the principal races and peoples, organized by geographic distribution and composite traits. He outlines broad groupings recognized by his era, describes their general physical profiles, and notes characteristic languages and cultural patterns. The narrative proceeds region by region, indicating major families and subfamilies, and identifying transitional zones and mixed populations. Throughout, he emphasizes the provisional nature of such schemes and the likelihood of revisions as evidence improves. The aim is to present a workable map of human diversity in which recurring correspondences, rather than single features, define coherent ethnographic units.
The lectures devote special attention to the Americas, reflecting Brinton’s expertise. He surveys the indigenous populations, summarizing linguistic families, cultural areas, and archaeological sequences. The account includes proposed migration routes, the role of geographic barriers, and the distribution of characteristic arts and institutions. Brinton reviews how linguistic comparison helps arrange tribes and nations into historical relationships, while material culture and myth support or refine those linkages. He discusses the timing and direction of movements and the formation of regional centers. The section illustrates his broader method by applying coordinated evidence to a large continental case, integrating language, somatology, and culture.
Brinton also examines contact, mixture, and change. He describes how migration, conquest, trade, and intermarriage produce new populations, alter languages, and reshape cultural patterns. The lectures explore the formation of nationalities from diverse elements and the persistence or disappearance of types under varying conditions. He considers environment, economy, and political organization as forces that stabilize or transform identities. Attention is given to maps and classification tools that track these dynamics through time. This portion of the work underscores ethnography’s historical character: human groups are not static units but evolving aggregates whose boundaries and attributes shift with circumstances.
The book concludes by restating the purpose of a scientific ethnography: to synthesize physical, linguistic, and cultural evidence into a coherent account of human diversity and its history. Brinton calls for standardized methods, careful statistics, and critical evaluation of sources. He emphasizes that classifications are hypotheses to be tested as new data arise. The closing sections point to future research needs, including broader fieldwork, improved measurements, and comprehensive comparative corpora. Overall, the lectures present a framework for studying races and peoples that integrates multiple disciplines, seeks convergent proof, and aims to explain distribution, relationship, and change across the human world.
Historical Context
Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography appeared in the United States in 1890, published in New York by N. D. C. Hodges, and distilled lectures Daniel G. Brinton delivered in the late 1880s within Philadelphia’s scientific milieu. The work emerged amid the Gilded Age, when industrial expansion, unprecedented immigration, and imperial ambitions reshaped public debate. Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences and the University of Pennsylvania, where Brinton held a chair from 1886, were nodes in a transatlantic network linking American, British, and French anthropology. The period’s confidence in measurable progress and classificatory science framed Brinton’s effort to systematize human variation, merging linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology into a purportedly comprehensive ethnographic science.
A central historical current shaping the book was the Darwinian revolution. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), amplified by Thomas H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer, propelled evolutionary thinking into debates on human origins, variation, and capability. By the 1880s, terms like natural selection and struggle for existence structured arguments far beyond biology. Brinton adopts this framework, treating races as populations subject to selection, adaptation, and differentiation over time. His lectures mirror post-1870 efforts to reconcile monogenist biblical narratives with evolutionary descent, and to use evolutionary stages of culture as an explanatory grid for ranking societies encountered by American and European observers.
Equally decisive was the institutional rise of physical anthropology and its measuring practices. In Philadelphia, Samuel George Morton’s craniological studies, Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), popularized skull measurement as a proxy for intelligence and antiquity, creating a local precedent Brinton could not ignore. In Paris, Paul Broca founded the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris in 1859 and promoted cephalic indices, while his student Paul Topinard systematized anthropometric protocols in the 1870s. Anders Retzius’s brachycephalic and dolichocephalic categories (1840s) were applied across Europe and the Americas; Rudolf Virchow in Berlin criticized simplistic indices in the 1870s but still engaged anthropometric data. Museums and learned societies in London, Berlin, Paris, and Philadelphia exchanged calipers, color scales, and metric standards to render bodies comparable across continents. By the 1880s, standardized instruments and techniques (nasal indices, hair form typologies, skin gradations) were fixtures of field reports sent from colonial stations, missions, and U.S. Army posts. Brinton’s book reflects this apparatus: he inventories measurable traits, tabulates cranial and somatic averages, and correlates them with language families and material culture. He cites European authorities, draws contrasts among Indo-European, Semitic, and so-called primitive groups, and argues that stable, inheritable differences had historical consequences. Even when acknowledging environmental effects or cultural plasticity, he positions bodily metrics as key evidence for racial classification. Thus the lectures are inseparable from a nineteenth-century anthropometric regime that sought precision and universality, yet encoded preexisting hierarchies into its instruments and categories.
U.S. Indian policy and the emergence of government-funded ethnology formed another crucial backdrop. The Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, founded in 1879 under John Wesley Powell, coordinated linguistic surveys, artifact collection, and field reports. Federal policies, including the Dawes Act of 1887 and the expansion of off-reservation boarding schools such as Carlisle (founded 1879 in Pennsylvania), promoted dispossession and assimilation. The massacre at Wounded Knee in December 1890 marked the violent culmination of the Indian Wars. Brinton’s lectures, drawing on BAE data and his own Americanist work, classify Indigenous languages and cultures in ways that reflect the era’s salvage ethnography and its assumption that Native societies were disappearing under U.S. expansion.
Immigration and nativist politics in the 1880s and 1890s also shaped the book’s categories. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the Contract Labor Law (1885), and the Immigration Act (1891), followed by the Geary Act (1892), formalized racialized control over entry and labor. Public controversies over so-called new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe intensified after the 1890 Census. Brinton’s ethnographic maps and discussions of European and Asian stocks intersect with these anxieties, parsing Indo-European, Semitic, and other groupings as distinct racial or ethnical types. His attempt to relate physical features and language to national character mirrors legislative and journalistic efforts to sort desirable from undesirable migrants.
The Scramble for Africa and high imperialism supplied both data and ideology. The Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 carved spheres of influence; the Congo Free State was proclaimed in 1885; and chartered enterprises like the British South Africa Company (1889) advanced extractive rule. International expositions, such as Paris 1889 and Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, staged ethnographic villages and comparative displays. Brinton’s synthesis relies on colonial reports describing African, Oceanian, and Asian peoples, and echoes civilizing discourses that graded societies by technological attainment. His portrayal of global races is thus intertwined with imperial infrastructures that enabled, and biased, ethnographic observation.
Debates on monogenism versus polygenism and the emergence of eugenic thought furnished additional context. Earlier American polygenists like Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon (Types of Mankind, 1854) argued for separate origins, while Darwinian monogenists retained common descent but allowed divergence. Francis Galton coined eugenics in 1883, prompting transatlantic discussions of heredity, selection, and social policy. In the United States, the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 weakened federal protections, and state-level segregation expanded through the 1890s. Brinton positions his lectures within these currents, rejecting crude polygenism yet advancing hierarchical racial comparisons and hereditary explanations that were readily absorbed into eugenic and segregationist arguments.
As a social and political critique, the book is revealing precisely because it codifies the era’s governing assumptions. By translating imperial observations, immigration fears, and settler-colonial policies into taxonomies of race, it exposes how science was mobilized to naturalize inequality, justify assimilation, and rationalize exclusion. Its reliance on metrics and evolutionary staging critiques contemporary societies only insofar as they deviate from an ideal of progress defined by Euro-American norms, thereby illuminating the moral blind spots of the Gilded Age. Read historically, the lectures make visible the entanglement of knowledge and power and the social injustices that such classifications enabled and sustained.
Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography
MAPS, SCHEMES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
Figs. 1 and 2. Long and short skulls
21
Fig. 3. Lines of sutures in the skull
22
Fig. 4. Lines and angles of skull measurements
25
Fig. 5. Cross-sections of hairs
32
Fig. 6. Primary arrow-release
34
Fig. 7. Mediterranean arrow-release
34
Fig. 8. Mongolian arrow-release
35
Scheme of Principal Physical Elements
49
Scheme of Languages
64
Scheme of Geologic Time during the Age of Man in the Eastern Hemisphere
96
General Ethnographic Scheme
99
Scheme of the Eurafrican Race: South Mediterranean Branch
104
Scheme of the Eurafrican Race: North Mediterranean Branch
140
Scheme of Aryac Migration
153
Scheme of the Austafrican Race
174
Scheme of the Asian Race
194
Scheme of Insular and Littoral Peoples
220
Outlines of the Eastern Hemisphere in the Early Quaternary
88
Ethnic Chart of the Eurafrican Race
112
Ethnic Chart of Africa
176
Ethnic Chart of Eurasia and Asia
198
Ethnic Chart of Hindostan
244
Indian Tribes of the United States
256
LECTURES ON ETHNOGRAPHY.
LECTURE I.THE PHYSICAL ELEMENTS OF ETHNOGRAPHY.
Contents.—Differences and resemblances in individuals and races the basis of Ethnography. The Bones. Craniology[1]. Its limited value. Long and short skulls. Sutures. Inca bone[2]. The orbital index. The nasal index. The maxillary and facial angles. The cranial capacity. The teeth. The iliac bones. Length of the arms. The flattened tibia. The projecting heel. The heart line. The Color. Its extent; cause; scale of colors. Color of the eyes. The Hair. Shape in cross section; abundance. The muscular structure; anomalies in; muscular habits; arrow releases. Steatopygy. Stature and proportion; the “canon of proportion;” special senses; the color sense. Ethnic relations of the sexes. Correlation of physical traits to vital powers. Causes of the fixation of ethnic traits. Climate; food supply; natural selection; conscious selection; the physical ideal; sexual preference; abhorrence of incest; exogamous marriages. Causes of variation in types. The mingling of races. Physical criteria of racial superiority. Review of physical elements.
That no two persons are identical in appearance [1q]is such a truism that we are apt to overlook its significance. The parent can rarely be recognized from the traits of the child, the brother from those of the sister, the family from its members.
On the other hand, the individual peculiarities become lost in those of the race. It is a common statement that to our eyes all Chinamen look alike, or that one cannot distinguish an Indian “buck” from a “squaw.” Yet you recognize very well the one as a Chinaman, the other as an Indian. The traits of the race thus overslaugh the variable characters of the family, the sex or the individual, and maintain themselves uniform and unalterable in the pure blood of the stock through all experience.
This fact is the corner-stone of the science of Ethnography, whose aim is to study the differences, physical and mental, between men in masses, and ascertain which of these differences are least variable and hence of most value in classifying the human species into its several natural varieties or types.
In daily life and current literature the existence of such varieties is fully recognized. The European and African, or White and Black races, are those most familiar to us; but the American Indian and the Mongolian are not rare, and are recognized also as distinct from each other and ourselves. These common terms for the races are not quite accurate; but they illustrate a tendency to identify the most prominent types of the species with the great continental areas, and in this I shall show that the popular judgment is in accord with scientific reasoning.
If an ordinary observer were asked what the traits are which fix the racial type in his mind, he would certainly omit many which are highly esteemed by the man of science. He would have nothing to say, for instance, about the internal structures or organs, because they are not visible; but in approaching the subject from a scientific direction, we must lay most stress upon these, as their peculiarities decide the external traits which strike the eye.
Nor does the casual observer note the mental or physical differences which exist between the races whom he recognizes; yet these are not less permanent and not less important than those which concern the physical economy only. In both these directions the student of ethnography as a science must pursue careful researches.
In the present lecture I shall pass in review the physical elements held to be most weighty in the discrimination of racial types; and, first, those relating to
The Bones.—Most important are the measurements of the skull, that science called craniology, or craniometry.
Ethnologists who are merely anatomists have made too much of this science. They have applied it to the exclusion of other elements, and have given it a prominence which it does not deserve. The shape of the skull is no distinction of race in the individual; only in the mass, in the average of large numbers, has it importance. Even here its value is not racial. Within the limits of the same people, as among the Slavonians, for example, the most different skulls are found, and even the pure-blood natives of some small islands in the Pacific Ocean present widely various forms.1
Experiments on the lower animals prove that the skull is easily moulded by trifling causes. Darwin found that he could produce long, or short, or non-symmetrical skulls in rabbits by training.2 The shape also bears a relation to stature. As a general rule short men have short or rounded heads, tall men have long heads. The longest skulled nation in Europe are the Norwegians, who are also the tallest; the roundest are the Auvergnats, who, of all the European whites, are the shortest.
Nevertheless, employed cautiously, in large averages, and with a careful regard for all the other ethnic elements, the measurements of the skull are extremely useful as accessory data of comparison.
Some craniologists have run up these measurements to more than a hundred; but those worth mentioning in this connection are but few. There is, first, the proportion which the length of the head has to its breadth. This makes the distinction between long, medium and broad skulls, “dolicho-cephalic,” “meso-cephalic,” and “brachy-cephalic.” In the medium skull the transverse bears to the longitudinal diameter the proportion of about 80:100. The proportion 75:100 would make quite a long skull, and 85:100 quite a broad skull, the extreme variations not exceeding 70:100–90:100. (Figs. 1 and 2.)
Figs. 1 and 2.—Long and Short Skulls.
The Asiatic race or typical Mongolians are generally brachy-cephalic, the Eskimos and African negroes dolicho-cephalic; while the whites of Europe and American Indians present great diversity.
The lengthening of the skull may be anteriorly or posteriorly, and this is probably more significant of brain power than its width. In the black race the lengthening is occipital, that is at the rear, indicating a preponderance of the lower mental powers.
Fig. 3.—Lines of Sutures in the Skull.
The height of the skull is another measurement which is much respected by craniologists; but they are far from agreed as to the points from which the lines shall be drawn, so that it is difficult to compare their results.3 The “sutures,” or lines of union between the several bones of the skull, present indications of great value. In the lower races they are much simpler than in the higher, and they become obliterated earlier in life; the bones of the skull thus uniting into a compact mass and preventing further expansion of the cavity occupied by the brain.4 (Fig. 3.) Occasionally small separated bones are found in these sutures, more frequently in some races than in others. One of these, toward the back of the head, occurs so constantly in certain American tribes that it has been named the “Inca bone.”5
In many savage tribes there are artificial deformations of the skull, which render it useless as a means of comparison. The “Flathead Indians” are an example, and many Peruvian skulls are thus pressed out of shape. It is singular that this violence to such an important organ does not seem to be attended with any injurious result on the intellectual powers.
The orbit of the eyes is another feature which varies in races. The proportion of the short to the long diameter furnishes what is known as the “orbital index.” The Mongolians present nearest a circular orbit, the proportion being sometimes 93:100; while the lowest range has been found in skulls from ancient French cemeteries, presenting an index of 61:100. The latter are technically called “microsemes;” the former “megasemes,” while the mean are “mesosemes.”6
In a similar manner the aperture of the nostrils varies and constitutes quite an important element of comparison known as the “nasal index.” Where this aperture is narrow, the nose is thin and prominent; when broad, the nose is large and flat. The former are “leptorhinian,” the latter “platyrhinian,” while the medium size is “mesorhinian.” This division coincides closely with that of the chief races. Almost all the white race are leptorhinian, the negroes platyrhinian, the true Asiatics mesorhinian. The Eskimos have the narrowest nasal aperture, the Bushmen the widest.
The projection of the maxillaries, or upper and lower jaws, beyond the line of the face, is a highly significant trait. When well marked it forms the “prognathic,” when slight the “orthognathic” type. It is much more observable in the black than in the white race, and is more pronounced in the old than in the young. It is considered to correspond to a stronger development of the merely animal instincts.
The relation of the lower to the upper part of the head is measured mainly by two angles, the one the “maxillary,” the other the “facial” angle. The former is the angle subtended by lines drawn from the most projecting portion of the maxillaries to the most prominent points of the forehead above and the chin below. (The angle M G S in the accompanying diagram, Fig. 4.) This supplies data for two important elements, the prognathism and the prominence of the chin. The latter is an essential feature of man. None of the lower animals possesses a true chin, while man is never without one. The more acute the maxillary angle, the less of chin is there, and the more prognathic the subject. The averages run as follows:
The European white
160°.
The African negro
140°.
The Orang-outang
110°.
Fig. 4.—Lines and angles of skull measurement.
The facial angle is that subtended by the same line, from the most prominent point of the upper jaw to the most prominent part of the forehead, and a second line drawn horizontally through the center of the aperture of the ear. (The lines M G, D N.) It expresses the relative prominence of the forehead and capacity of the anterior portion of the brain. The more acute this angle, the lower is the brain capacity. The following are its averages:
The European white
80°.
The African negro
70°. to 75°.
The Orang-outang
40°.
The amount of brain matter contained in a skull is called its “cerebral or cranial capacity.” This is proved by investigation to average less in the dark than in the light races, and in the same race less in the female than in the male sex. Estimated in cubic centimetres the extremes are about 1250 cub. cent. in the Australians and Bushmen to 1600 cub. cent. in well-developed Europeans. We cannot regard this measurement as a constant exponent of intellectual power, as many men with small brains have possessed fine intellects; but as a general feature it certainly is indicative of brain weight, and therefore of relative intelligence. The average human brain weighs 48 ounces, while that of a large gorilla is not over 20 ounces.
The teeth offer several points of difference in races. In the negro they are unusually white and strong, and in nearly all the black people (Australians, Soudanese, Melanesians, etc.), the “wisdom teeth” are generally furnished with three separate fangs, and are sound, while among whites they have only two fangs, and decay early. The most ancient jaws exhumed in Europe present the former character. The prominence of the canine teeth is a peculiarity of some tribes, while in others the canines are not conical, but resemble the incisors.
The size of the teeth has also been asserted to be an index of race, and an effort has been made to classify peoples into small-toothed (microdonts), medium-toothed (mesodonts), and large-toothed (megadonts).7 But this scheme includes in the first mentioned class the Polynesians with the Europeans, and in the second the African negro with the Chinese, which looks as if the plan has little value.
The milk-teeth have a much closer resemblance to those of the apes than the second dentition, and some naturalists have thought that the forms of the second teeth point often to reversion and are characteristic of races, but this has not been proved.
The teeth and the period of dentition have been studied in man with the view to show that certain races more than others retain the dental forms of the lower animals, but the latest investigations go rather to overthrow than to support these theories.8
Turning to the other bones of the skeleton, I shall note a few peculiarities said to be ethnic. The skeleton of a negro usually presents iliac bones more vertical than those of a white man, and the basin is narrower. This peculiarity is measured by what is called the “pelvic index,” by which is meant the ratio of the transverse to the longitudinal diameter. The average ratio is about 90 or 95 to 100.
Another trait of a lower osteology is the unusual length of the arms. This is found to depend upon the relative elongation of the fore-arm and its principal bones, the radius and ulna. From comparisons which have been instituted between the negro and the white, it appears that the proportionate length of their arms is as 78 to 72. The long arms are characteristic of the higher apes and the unripe fetus, and belong, therefore, to a lower phase of development than that reached by the white race.
There is also a peculiarity among many lower peoples in the shape of the shin-bone or tibia. Usually when cut in cross-section, the ends present a triangular surface; but in certain tribes, and in some ancient remains from the caves, the cross-section is elliptical, showing that the tibia has been flattened (platycnemic). This was long regarded as a sign of ethnic inferiority, but of late years the opinion of anatomists has undergone a change, and they attribute it to the special use of some of the muscles of the leg.
The heel-bone, the os calcis or calcaneum, is currently believed to be longer and project further backward in the negro than in the white man. There is no doubt of the projection of the heel, and it is typical of the true negro race, but it does not seem to be owing to the size of the bone, as an examination of a series of calcanca in both races proves. The lengthening is apparent only, and is due to the smallness of the calf and the slenderness of the main tendon, the “tendon of Achilles,” immediately above the heel.9
With the pithecoid forms of the bones is often associated another simian mark. The line in the hand known to chiromancy as the “heart” line, in all races but the negro ceases at the base of the middle finger, but in his race, as in the ape, it often extends quite across the palm.
The bones offer the most enduring, but not the most obvious distinctions of races. The latter are unquestionably those presented by
The Color.—This it is which first strikes the eye, and from which the most familiar names of the types have been drawn. The black and white, the yellow, the red and the brown races, are terms far older than the science of ethnography, and have always been employed in its terminology.
Why it is that these different hues should indelibly mark whole races, is not entirely explained. The pigment or coloring matter of the skin is deposited from the capillaries on the surface of the dermis or true skin, and beneath the epidermis or scarf skin.10 I have seen a negro so badly scalded that the latter was detached in large fragments, and with it came most of his color, leaving the spot a dirty light brown.
The coloration of the negro, however, extends much beyond the skin. It is found in a less degree on all his mucous membrane, in his muscles, and even in the pia mater and the grey substance of his brain.
The effort has been made to measure the colors of different peoples by a color scale. One such was devised by Broca, presenting over thirty shades, and another by Dr. Radde, in Germany; but on long journeys, or as furnished by different manufacturers, these scales undergo changes in the shades, so that they have not proved of the value anticipated.
As to the physiological cause of color, you know that the direct action of the sun on the skin is to stimulate the capillary action, and lead to an increased deposit of pigment, which we call “tan.” This pigment is largely carbon, a chemical element, principally excreted by the lungs in the form of carbonic oxide. When from any cause, such as a peculiar diet, or a congenital disproportion of lungs to liver, the carbonic oxide is less rapidly thrown off by the former organs, there will be an increased tendency to pigmentary deposit on the skin. This is visibly the fact in the African blacks, whose livers are larger in proportion to their lungs than in any other race.11
While all the truly black tribes dwell in or near the tropics, all the arctic dwellers are dark, as the Lapps, Samoyeds and Eskimos; therefore, it is not climate alone which has to do with the change. The Americans differ little in color among themselves from what part soever of the continent they come, and the Mongolians, though many have lived time immemorial in the cold and temperate zone, are never really white when of unmixed descent.
A practical scale for the colors of the skin is the following:
Dark.
{1. Black.
{2. Dark brown, reddish undertone.
{3. Dark brown, yellowish undertone.
Medium.
{1. Reddish.
{2. Yellowish (olive).
White.
{1. White, brown undertone (grayish).
{2. White, yellow undertone.
{3. White, rosy undertone.
The color of the eyes should next have attention. Their hue is very characteristic of races and of families. Light eyes with dark skins are rare exceptions. Other things equal, they are lighter in men than in women. Extensive statistics have been collected in Europe to ascertain the prevalence of certain colors, and instructive results have been obtained.12 The division usually adopted is into dark and light eyes.
Dark eyes.
{1. Black.
{2. Brown.
Light eyes.
{1. Light brown (hazel).
{2. Gray.
{3. Blue.
The eye must be examined at some little distance so as to catch the total effect.
Next in the order of prominence is
The Hair.—Indeed, Haeckel and others have based upon its character the main divisions of mankind. That of some races is straight, of others more or less curled. This difference depends upon the shape of the hairs in cross-section. The more closely they assimilate true cylinders, the straighter they hang; while the flatter they are, the more they approach the appearance of wool. (Fig. 5.) The variation of the two diameters (transverse and longitudinal) is from 25:100 to 90:100. The straightest is found among the Malayans and Mongolians; the wooliest among the Hottentots, Papuas and African negroes. The white race is intermediate, with curly or wavy hair. It is noteworthy that all woolly-haired peoples have also long, narrow heads and protruding jaws.
Fig. 5.—Cross Sections of Hairs.
The amount of hair on the face and body is also a point of some moment. As a rule, the American and Mongolian peoples have little, the Europeans and Australians abundance. Crossing of races seems to strengthen its growth, and the Ainos of the Japanese Archipelago, a mixed people, are probably the hairiest of the species. The strongest growth on the head is seen among the Cafusos of Brazil[3], a hybrid of the Indian and negro.[2q]
The Muscular Structure.—The development of the muscular structure offers notable differences in the various races. The blacks, both in Africa and elsewhere, have the gastrocnemii or calf muscles of the leg very slightly developed; while in both them and the Mongolians the facial muscles have their fibres more closely interwoven than the whites, thus preventing an equal mobility of facial expression.
The anomalies of the muscular structure seem about as frequent in one race as in another. The most of them are regressive, imitating the muscles of the apes, monkeys, and lower mammals. Indeed, a learned anatomist has said that the abnormal anatomy of the muscles supplies all the gaps which separate man from the higher apes, as all the simian characteristics reappear from time to time in his structure.13
Certain motions or positions, such as I may call “muscular habits,” are characteristic of extensive groups of tribes. The method of resting is one such. The Japanese squats on his hams, the Australian stands on one leg, supporting himself by a spear or pole, and so on. The methods of arrow-release have been profitably studied by Professor E. S. Morse[5]. He finds them so characteristic that he classifies them ethnographically, with reference to savagery and civilization, and locality. The three most important are the primary, the Mediterranean, and the Mongolian releases. The first is that of many savage tribes, the second was practiced principally by the white race, the last by the Mongolians and their neighbors. (Figs. 6, 7, 8.) The last two are the most effective, and thus gave superiority in combat.
Fig. 6.—Primary Arrow-Release.
