We must therefore be content to resign the hope of anything like a review of man’s life since the beginning. Before we see him clearly, he had probably spread far and wide over the earth, and already separated into the three or four most important divisions of the race. It is usual to divide the human race into four divisions named after, but not entirely founded upon, the colour of their skins. These divisions are the black, yellow, red, and white races. I do not propose to go into any elaborate description either of the peculiarities or the _habitat_ of these four sections of humanity. The greater part of mankind have no place in history properly so called. We know them only in the present, their past is lost for ever. And the present volume being designed to open the door to history is really not concerned with races such as these. It will be enough very briefly to indicate the main characteristics of the four races of mankind, and to refer the reader for more information to the chapter in Mr. Tylor’s _Anthropology_ dealing with the subject. [Sidenote: The Black Races.] The black or negro race, then, consists of two divisions the negroes of Africa, and the negroes of certain among the islands of the Pacific bordering upon Australia and called Melanesia. This Melanesia, or ‘the negro islands’ as we might call them, include Tasmania, New Guinea, and a great number of smaller islands. But they do not include Australia and New Zealand, the inhabitants of both which countries have physical features differing from those of the genuine negro, though the Australian type approaches very near to his. The colour of the skin is not really the chief characteristic of this race, but far more so is the very crisp hair (what is called wool), the very flat and broadened nose, the broad lips, and the advanced under-jaw, or, as it is called, the _prognathism_ of the face. This black race has never had anything that deserves to be called either a literature or a history. [Sidenote: The Red Races.] The red race, which we will take next, is that which inhabits or, till the Europeans came, inhabited the whole of America, North and South, except the extreme North, the country of the Eskimo. We take these people next because they are almost as unknown to history as are the negroes. The peculiarities of the red races are their red skin, their high cheek-bones, the straight black hair which, exactly opposite to that of the negro, never curls.[40] This race has not been quite so stationary as the negro. Some of its members, the Aztecs of Mexico, the Incas of Peru, did attain to a considerable civilization. But they had advanced no way in the art of writing or keeping records of their past, which is thus wholly lost to us; and we have no means of connecting the civilization of the red races with the civilization of that part of the world which has had a history.