To the various populations which occupy the Arctic regions of both the Old and the New World, the general appellation of Hyperboreans is sometimes given. Do these populations truly form, as some ethnologists assert, a distinct and homogeneous race; or are they not rather independent offshoots of the Japhetic race in Europe, of the Mongolian in Asia, of the Redskins in America? To this question I can give no satisfactory reply. I will only say that if the different fractions of this great group exhibit among themselves external differences of a very marked character, they are drawn together, on the other hand, by no less striking resemblances. In truth, these resemblances are markedly physiological, and should, I think, be exclusively attributed to the powerful and irresistible action of external agencies. If there be, indeed, one region where the influence of climate on the constitution of man is manifest, that region is assuredly the Polar Zone. There the conditions of life differ wholly from those which prevail in all other parts of the globe, and it necessarily results that modifications take place in the organism of the men subject to those conditions, which ought to be regarded as wholly independent of the origin of races and of their ethnographic characters properly so called. The Hyperboreans are small, squat, ugly, and deformed. Their legs are short and sufficiently straight, but so thick, says Bory de St. Vincent, that to the spectator they seem swollen and diseased. Their head is generally of large size. They have long, coarse, straight hair, a thin beard, a broad countenance, a great mouth, high cheek-bones, and half-closed eyes, of a light colour, as gray or yellowish, but never blue. Their complexion is sometimes of a yellowish-white, as with the Laplanders; sometimes of a deep yellow or reddish-brown, as with the Eskimos and the Greenlanders. The latter peculiarity may be invoked as a very plausible argument in support of the opinion which gives to the Arctic peoples different origins. It shows also, once more, that the more or less intense colouring of the skin among the African races is not an effect of the solar heat, as was commonly supposed.