The geographical distribution of the Caucasian family in the present day is nearly co-extensive with the land area of the globe; but this family of nations is most numerously developed within the temperate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Western Asia, the European continent (with the exception of a portion in the extreme north), and the northern belt of Africa, are the proper home of the Caucasian tribes. Thence they have colonized nearly every part of the New World, as well as Southern Africa and the more distant regions of Australia and New Zealand, at the opposite side of the globe. Nine-tenths of the population of Europe belong to the Caucasian family of man, the small minority who constitute the exception consisting of the Turks, the Magyars, the Finns, the Laplanders, and the Samoiedes. In Asia, the Caucasian nations form but a minority of its vast population; they include, however, the natives of the Arabian or Semitic stock, the Persians, the Afghans, and perhaps also (such, at least, is the generally received theory) the Hindoos--that is, all the people dwelling to the south of the Himalaya and to the west of the Bay of Bengal. In Africa, the proportion of Caucasians to its population is probably small, though they are spread over the whole of Northern Africa, from the Mediterranean to the southern border of the desert, and the furthest limit of Abyssinia. In America, the Caucasian family--settling in that part of the world as colonists only within the last three centuries and a half--is fast supplanting the indigenous races, and comprehends two-thirds of the total number of its inhabitants in the present day. Within the temperate latitudes of North America, that is, within the valleys of the Mississippi and St. Lawrence, with the Atlantic seaboard from the Gulf of St. Lawrence southward, the white race is most numerous. Five-sixths of the present population of North America belong, either in whole or in part, to the Caucasian stock. In the case of Australia, the diminution in the numbers of the native race has been even more rapid than in the case of the Western Continent. The white race, whose date of settlement on the Australian shores is as yet hardly more than three-quarters of a century, now vastly outnumbers the indigenous tribes. In Tasmania, the latter have indeed become extinct. Even in New Zealand, which was peopled by an athletic tribe of savages when Captain Cook visited it less than a century since, the colonial population, planted on its shores within the last forty years, now greatly outnumbers the native tribes, which, moreover, undergo gradual diminution in numerical amount.