These characteristics the negroes possess in common with the Pygmies and the Negritos. Others of less significance could be named. One important character is that of the cranial sutures, which close much earlier in the negro than in higher races, thus checking the development of the brain while the body is still growing. To this many ascribe the mental inferiority of the negro race. A close observer records, as a result of long observation on the plantations of the southern United States, that "the negro children were sharp, intelligent, and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence." This is very probably the case with the Pygmies, who similarly reach a mental limit beyond which they cannot advance; but this limit is set in the adult period. In other words, the adult Pygmy is on the mental level of the negro child. If the African Pygmy is as short lived as his Eastern congener, he does not survive, as a rule, many years beyond the age of adolescence, and continues in a stage of childhood, mentally considered, until death. The conclusion to be derived from this interesting fact would appear to be that the negro has made a distinct and important advance mentally beyond the Pygmy, reaching at adolescence the limit of mental evolution which the Pygmy reaches at death. But the negro stops here, or goes little beyond this limit. His cranial sutures close, the growth of the brain is arrested, and the development of his mind comes to an end. In the white the brain continues to expand, and the closing of the sutures takes place later in life. Probably the latter is a result of the former, mental development having overcome the tendency of the sutures to close in early life. It may be further said of the negro that, mentally, he is emotional far more than intellectual, and unmoral rather than immoral, he being apparently incapable of comprehending the moral conceptions of advanced man. If we seek the Malaysian and Australasian region of the Eastern seas, we find there another branch of the negro race, similarly in contact with, and apparently derived from, a Pygmy stock. This Papuan race of blacks covers a wide island region, but, like the African race, has become greatly modified by mixture with alien peoples, largely of Malay origin. Its purest type is to be found in New Guinea, where it approaches the negro in general character, though with distinctive features of its own. The Papuan is of medium height; fleshy rather than muscular; color a sooty brown; forehead high, but narrow and retreating; nose sometimes flat and wide at nostrils, but oftener hooked with depressed point; lips thick and projecting; high cheek bones; prognathism general; hair black and frizzly. He is negroid in appearance, and is said to resemble the African of the coast region opposite Aden.