The actual evolutionary area of the negro sub-species of _Homo sapiens_ is unknown to us at present. At one time it was thought likely to have been India. There is a strong underlying negroid element in the mass of the Indian population; and in the southernmost part of the great peninsula there are forest tribes of dark skin and strikingly negro physiognomy, with frizzled or woolly hair. There is a negroid element in the gentle Burmese; and in the Andaman Islands—geologically little more than a depressed peninsula of Further India—the dwarfish people are absolute negroes of the Asiatic type. In the Malay Peninsula, here and there in Sumatra, above all in the Philippine archipelago, there are Negrito tribes or types akin to the Andaman islanders. In the more eastern among the Malay islands—especially in Buru, Jilolo, and Timor—the interior tribes are of obvious negro stock. Still more marked is this in the case of New Guinea, and most of all in the Bismarck archipelago and northern Solomon Islands. In these last the resemblance of the natives to the average negro of Africa is most striking, although the distance from Africa is something like 8000 miles. Negroid affinities extend east of the Solomon archipelago to Fiji and Hawai, and south to New Caledonia, Tasmania and even New Zealand. On the other hand, Africa for many thousand years has been obviously the chief domain of the negro. Did the negro subspecies originate in, say, North Africa, and thence spread eastwards to Persia (southern Persia has vestiges of an ancient negroid population—the Elamites of the Hebrew scriptures), India, Further India, Malaysia, and Oceania? Or was Europe—southern Europe—the region where the negro specialized from some basic type like the Tasmanian Galley-Hill man? Or Arabia[1], Syria, or India? The evidence as yet before us is too slight to justify any positive theory. The probability is that some region of western Asia such as Syria was the birth-place of the negro of a generalized type, who from this centre migrated into northern Africa, southern Europe, and southern Asia. The discoveries made by Dr Verneaux and others in southern and western France and in Italy would seem to show that from 30,000 to 40,000 years ago the population of these regions was of negroid aspect, and that they were succeeded by the tall Cro-Magnon race of totally different type, more recalling Caucasian man and the taller Mongoloids, such as the Amerindian. A glance however at the populations of Italy, France, Spain, Wales, and southern Ireland shows the observant anthropologist that both in nigrescence and in facial features the ancient negroid strain has never been completely eliminated in these lands.