Catalogue of the specimens illustrating the osteology and dentition of vertebrated animals, recent and extinct : contained in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

  • Royal College of Surgeons of England. Museum
Date:
1879-1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Catalogue of the specimens illustrating the osteology and dentition of vertebrated animals, recent and extinct : contained in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The boundaries of the regions adopted do not always exactly coincide with those of political geography ; and a considerable concession to the claims of a classification based on physical characters has been made in the general arrangement of the series. It will be observed that the various regions of the world have been so grouped as to bring together those that are mainly inhabited:—(1) by the white or Caucasian races of Blumenbach, including the whole of Europe except the eastern frontiers of Russia, Africa north of the Sahara, and Asia south and west of the Himalayas; (2) by the yellow and red Mongolian and Mongoloid races, including the remainder of Asia, the Indo- Malay Archipelago, Eastern Polynesia, and the whole of America; (3) by the Australians, a race agreeing with the following section in every thing but the character of the hair; (4) by the frizzly- haired or black races—beginning with the Oceanic Negroes or Melanesians in the widest sense of the term (including the Tasmanians, Melanesians proper, Papuans, and Negritos of the Andaman Islands), and ending with the natives of Central and Southern Africa, the Negroes, Kaffirs, and Hottentots. Although the geographical arrangement has thus been made to run in the same lines with some of the best-ascertained facts in the zoological classification of Man, no attempt has been made to draw the boundaries too minutely. Any serial arrangement at the best can only be a compromise, especially in a collection so imperfectly representing the numerous and indefinite gradations of variation at present existing on the earth. Not only on the frontier-line between the territories in which two different races predominate, but far into the interior of each, mixed or even pure specimens of other races are to be found. It must not, therefore, be considered that any individual skull classed among the inhabitants of a country mainly occupied by a particular race belongs as a matter of certainty to that race, especially when the history and external appearance of the individual before death may be utterly unknown. It is, however, obvious that the larger each series becomes, the less such accidental