THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE VARIETIES OF MAN. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE VARIETIES OF MAN. BY ROBERT GORDON LATHAM, M.D., F.R.S., LATE FELLOW OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE; ONE OF THE VICE-PRESIDENTS OF THE ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY, LONDON; CORRESPONDING MEMBER TO THE ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY, NEW YORK, ETC. LONDON: JOHN VAN VOORST, PATERNOSTER ROW. M.D.CCCL. LONDON: Printed by S. & J. BENTLEY and HENRY FLEY, Bangor House, Shoe Lane. TO EDWIN NORRIS, ESQ., OF THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY, TO WHOSE VALUABLE INFORMATION AND SUGGESTIONS MANY OF THE STATEMENTS AND OPINIONS OF THE PRESENT VOLUME OWE THEIR ORIGIN, ~The following Pages are Inscribed~, BY HIS FRIEND, THE AUTHOR. London, July 25th, 1850. PREFACE. If the simple excellence of a book were a sufficient reason for making it the only one belonging to the sciences which it professed to illustrate, few writers would be desirous of attempting a systematic work upon the Natural History of their species, after the admirable Physical History of Mankind, by the late and lamented Dr. Prichard,--a work which even those who are most willing to defer to the supposed superior attainments of Continental scholars, are not afraid to place on an unapproached eminence in respect to both our own and other countries. The fact of its being the production of one who was at one and the same time a physiologist amongst physiologists, and a scholar amongst scholars, would have made it this; since the grand ethnological _desideratum_ required at the time of its publication, was a work which, by combining the historical, the philological, and the anatomical methods, should command the attention of the naturalist, as well as of the scholar. Still it was a work of a rising rather than of a stationary science; and the very stimulus which it supplied, created and diffused a spirit of investigation, which--as the author himself would, above all men, have desired--rendered subsequent investigations likely to modify the preceding ones. A subject that a single book, however encyclopædic, can represent, is scarcely a subject worth taking up in earnest. Besides this, there are two other reasons of a more special and particular nature for the present addition to the literature of Ethnology.