Man and woman : a study of human secondary sexual characters / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Man and woman : a study of human secondary sexual characters / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    44/452 (page 26)
    dition ; Negroes and Australians are farthest removed from it, often although not always in the direction of the Ape ; while the white races occupy an intermediate position.^ In certain characters, however, the adult European is distinctly at the furthest remove as well from the simian and the savage as from the infantile condition; this is especially so as regards the nose, which only reaches full development in the adult white. In some other respects, as in the amount of hair on the body, the adult European recedes both from the specifically human and from the infantile condition, and remotely approaches the Ape. The variations and uncertainties are so considerable that we can never assume that because a given char- acter is simian or savage or senile, it belongs to all three groups; nor can we base arguments on any such assumed identity of the three groups. Practically, however, we do find that these three groups agree in various particulars to furnish characters which are removed to the furthest extremity from the child. Such characters are the comparatively small head, the large and fierce face, the long limbs, the general tend- ency to hairiness, the dark and wrinkled skin, the com- parative absence, usually, of fat and the exaggeration of the muscular and bony systems, a general tendency to ossification, and on the nervous and mental side a general inclination to rigidity and routine. Such characters are usually, though not quite universally, simian, savage and senile. So that we have on the one side the group of immature characters, and on the other side the group of over-mature characters; and any characteristic of the male or female adult indi- vidual may lean in either of these directions. Even, therefore, when the facts of secondary sexual differences are fairly established, there is sometimes a certain difficulty in arriving at the significance of the 1 See Professor J. Ranke, Uolicr das Mongolcnauge, etc., at the Bonn meeting of the German Anthropological Society, l888.