The natural history of the human species : its typical forms, primeval distribution, filiations, and migrations / by Chas. Hamilton Smith ; with a preliminary abstract of the views of Blumenbach, Prichard, Bachman, Agassiz, and other authors of repute on the subject, by S. Kneeland, Jr.

  • Smith, Charles Hamilton.
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The natural history of the human species : its typical forms, primeval distribution, filiations, and migrations / by Chas. Hamilton Smith ; with a preliminary abstract of the views of Blumenbach, Prichard, Bachman, Agassiz, and other authors of repute on the subject, by S. Kneeland, Jr. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    of the human race to certain lofty mountain chains. The birth-place of the men who peopled Europe and Western Asia is supposed to have been Mount Caucasus ; hence the term Caucasian as applied to them. The nations of Eastern Asia were derived from the neigh- borhood of Mount Altai; and the African Negroes from the southern face of the chain of Mount Atlas. The tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures places the birth-place of mankind on the banks of four great rivers, two of which have been recognized as the Tigris and Euphrates, in a land rich in animal and vegetable productions. Prichard recognizes three great centres of the earliest civilization of the human race, comprising most of the tribes known to antiquity. In one of these, the Semitic or Syro-Arabian nations exchanged the simple habits of wandering shepherds for the splendor and lux- ury of Nineveh and Babylon. In a second, the Indo-European or Japetic people brought to perfection the most elaborate of human dialects, destined to become, in after times and under different modi- fications, the mother tongue of the nations of Europe. In a third, the land of Ham, watered by the Nile, were invented hieroglyphical literature and the arts, in which Egypt far surpassed all the rest of the world in the earlier ages of history. These three divisions do not correspond to the three departments of mankind as indicated by the form of the skull; the former were neither nomades nor savages, but were more or less civilized and had the corresponding oval form of skull. Yet he would trace a gradual deviation from this type to the lower, e. g., from the Egyp- tian to the Negro, without any decided interruption ; though he admits that these approximations require further inquiry and more precise proofs before they can be admitted as furnishing the ground- work of an ethnological system. His Syro-Arabian or Semitic race includes the Syrians, the Jews, the Arabs. According to Baron Larrey, the Arabian race fur- nishes the most perfect type of the human head, and he believes that the cradle of the human family is to be found in the country of this race. The Egyptian or Hamitic race contrasts strongly with the Se- mitic, the latter being full of energy and restless activity, the former living in luxurious ease on the rich soil watered by the Nile. They are equally different in their intellectual and moral characters ; the one still living in its energetic and ever-roving descendants', the other reposing in its own land, which is little else than a vast sepulchre. According to Denon, the Egyptians display the » gen- uine African character, of which the Negro is the exaggerated and extreme representation. Some have called the Egyptians Negroes •