An introduction to the study of mammals living and extinct / by William Henry Flower and Richard Lydekker.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An introduction to the study of mammals living and extinct / by William Henry Flower and Richard Lydekker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    north-Ayest, and produced a modification of the i^hysical characters, especially of the hair. This influence did not extend across Bass's Straits into Tasmania, where, as just said, the Melanesian element remained in its purity. It is more strongly marked in the northern and central parts of Australia than on many portions of the southern and western coasts, where the lowness of type and more curly hair, sometimes closely approaching to frizzly, show a stronger retention of the Melanesian element. If the evidence should prove sufficiently strong to establish this view of the origin of the Australian natives, it will no longer be correct to speak of a primitive Australian, or even Australoid, race or type, or look for traces of the former existence of such a race anywhere out of their own land. Absolute proof of the origin of any race is, however, very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, and there is nothing to exclude the possibility of the Australians being mainly the direct descendants of a very primitive human type, from which the frizzly-haired Negroes may be an offset. This character of hair is probably a specialisation, for it seems very unlikely that it was the attribute of the common ancestors of the human race. E. The fourth branch of the Negroid race consists of the diminutive round-headed people called Negritos, still found in a pure or unmixed state in the Andaman Islands, and forming a substratum of the population, though now greatly mixed with in- vading races, especially Malays, in the Philippines, and many of the islands of the Indo-Malayan Archipelago, and of some parts of the southern portion of the mainland of Asia. They also con- tribute to the varied population of New Guinea, where they appear to merge into the taller, longer-headed, and longer-nosed Melanesians proper. They show in a very marked manner some of the most striking anatomical peculiarities of the Negro race, such as the frizzly hair, the proportions of the limbs, especially the humero- radial index, and the form of the pelvis; but they differ in many cranial and facial characters, both from the African Negroes on the one hand, and the typical Oceanic Negroes, or Melanesians, on the other, and thus form a very distinct and well-characterised group. Wherever they are still found they are obviously holding their own -svith difficulty, if not actually disappearing, and there is much about their condition of civilisation and the situations in which they occiu- to induce us to look upon them, as in the case of the Negi-illos of Central and the Bushmen of South Africa, as the remains of a population which occupied the land before the incom- ing of the present dominant races. II. The principal groups that can be arranged round the Mon- golian type are as follows :— A. The Eskimo appear to be a branch of the typical North