Man's Place in Nature, and Other EssaysHuxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Man's Place in Nature, and Other Essays
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Apes; Ethnology; Human beings -- Origin; Indo-Europeans
It will be observed that these diagrams reveal an immense range of
variation in the capacity and relative proportion to the cranial axis,
of the different regions of the cavity which contains the brain, in the
different skulls. Nor is the difference in the extent to which the
cerebral overlaps the cerebellar cavity less singular. A round skull
(Fig. 29, _Const._) may have a greater posterior cerebral projection
than a long one (Fig. 29, _Negro_).
[Illustration: FIG. 29.--Sections of orthognathous (light contour) and
prognathous (dark contour) skulls, one-third of the natural size. _a b_,
Basicranial axis; _b c_, _b´ c´_, plane of the occipital foramen; _d
d´_, hinder end of the palatine bone; _e e´_, front end of the upper
jaw; _TT_´, insertion of the tentorium.]
Until human crania have been largely worked out in a manner similar to
that here suggested--until it shall be an opprobrium to an ethnological
collection to possess a single skull which is not bisected
longitudinally--until the angles and measurements here mentioned,
together with a number of others of which I cannot speak in this place,
are determined, and tabulated with reference to the basicranial axis as
unity, for large numbers of skulls of the different races of Mankind, I
do not think we shall have any very safe basis for that ethnological
craniology which aspires to give the anatomical characters of the crania
of the different Races of Mankind.
At present, I believe that the general outlines of what may be safely
said upon that subject may be summed up in a very few words. Draw a line
on a globe from the Gold Coast in Western Africa to the steppes of
Tartary. At the southern and western end of that line there live the
most dolichocephalic, prognathous, curly-haired, dark-skinned of
men--the true Negroes. At the northern and eastern end of the same line
there live the most brachycephalic, orthognathous, straight-haired,
yellow-skinned of men--the Tartars and Calmucks. The two ends of this
imaginary line are indeed, so to speak, ethnological antipodes. A line
drawn at right angles, or nearly so, to this polar line through Europe
and Southern Asia to Hindostan, would give us a sort of equator, around
which round-headed, oval-headed, and oblong-headed, prognathous and
orthognathous, fair and dark races--but none possessing the excessively
marked characters of Calmuck or Negro--group themselves.
It is worthy of notice that the regions of the antipodal races are
antipodal in climate, the greatest contrast the world affords, perhaps,
being that between the damp, hot, steaming, alluvial coast plains of the
West Coast of Africa and the arid, elevated steppes and plateaux of
Central Asia, bitterly cold in winter, and as far from the sea as any
part of the world can be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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