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Show 158 EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. a marrtmtfer's brain, and finally becomes human. There is more than this, for, after completing the an.imal t_ran~formations, it passes through the characters In whiC~ 1t appears in the Negro, Malay, American, and Mongolian nations, and finally is Caucasian. The face partakes of these alterations. "One of the earliest points in which ossification commences is the lower jaw. This bone is consequently sooner completed than the other bones of the head, and acquires a predominance, which, as is well known, it never loses in the Negro. During the soft, pliant state of the bonei of the skull, the oblong form V\rhich they naturally assume approaches nearly the per'" manent shape of the Americans. At birth, the flattened face, and broad smooth forehead of the infant, the position of the eyes rather towards the side of the head, and the widened space between, represents the Mongolian form; while it is only as the child advances to maturity that the oval face, the arched forehead, and the marked fea· tures of the true Caucasian become perfectly develop· ed. "* The leading characters, in short, of the various races of mankind are si1nply representations of particular rtages in the development of the highest or 0 aucasian type. The Negro exhibits permanently the imperfect brain, projecting lower jaw, and slender bent limbs of a Caucasian child, some considerable time before the period of its birth. The aboriginal American represents the same child nearer birth. The Mongolian is an arrested infant, newly born; and so forth. All this is as respects form ;t but whence color? This might be supposed to have depended on climatal agencies only; but it has been shown by overpowering evidence to be independent of these. In further considering the matter, we are met by the very remarkable fact that color is deepest in the least perfectly-developed type, next in the Malay, next in the American, next in the Mongolian, the very order in which the degrees of devAlopment are ranged. May not color, then, depend upon developntent also? We do not, indeed. see that a Caucasian fretus at the stage \Yhich the African represents is anything like black; noither is a • Lord's Popular Physiology, explaining observation• by M Serres. t Conformably to this view, the beard, that peculiar attribute of maturity, is scanty in the Mongolian, and scarcely exists in the Americans and N egroe.s. EARLY HISTORY OF MANKlND. 159 Caucasian child yellow, like the Yongolian. There may, nevertheless, be~ c~araete~ of skin at a certain stage of developll!ent whiCh 1s predisposed to a particular color when It Is prese~1ted as the envel.ope of a mature being. Development being arrested at so Immature a stage in the case of the Negro, the skin may take on the color as an un~voidable consequ~nc~ of its imperfect org~.nization. It IS favorable to this VIew, that Negro infants are not deeply black at first, but only acquire the full color tint after exposure for some time to the atmosphere. Another consjderation in its favor is that there is a likelihood of peculiarities of form and color, since they are so coinci de.nt, depending on one set of phenomena. If it be ad m1tted as true, there can be no difficulty in accounting for all the varieties of mankind. They are simply the result of so many advances and retroo-ressions in the developing power of the human motl~e-rs, these advances ~nd re~rogressions being, as we have formerly seen, the Immediate effect of external conditions in nutrition hard. ship, &c.,* and also, perhaps, to some extent, of th~ suitableness and unsuitableness of marriages, for it is found that parents to? nearly relate~ tend to produce offspring o~ the Mongoltan tyi?e-that Is, persons who in maturity still are a kind of children. · A ccordino- to this view the greater part of the human race muste o be considere' d as having _lapsed or declined from the original type. In the ~aucas1an .or fndo-Eur.opean family alone has the primih ve orgamzat.wn been Improved upon. Th~ Mongolian, Malay, American, and Negrb, comprehending perhaps five-sixths of mankind, are degenerate. Strange that th~ great plan should admi't of failures and aberrations of such portentous magnitude ! But pause and reflect· take time Into con~ideration: the past history of manki~d may be, to what 1s to come, but as a day. Look at the progresa even now n1aking over the barbaric part3 of the earth by the best examples of the Caucasian type, promising not •. Of t~.is. we J;tave perhaps an illustration in the peculiarities \\~h1ch d1shngn1sh the Arahs residing in the valley of Jordan. '1 hey have flatter features, darker skins, and coarser hair than other tribes of their nation; an?! Wf> have see~1 one instaneP. of a thoroughly Negro family being born to an ordinary couple. 1t may be presumed that the conditions of the life of these people tend to arr~st deyelo-pment. We thus see how an offshoot of the human family mtgratmg at an early pP.riod into Africa might i!l time, from subjection to similar influences; become Neg~oeq |