usively long-headed.

One of the acutest and most original of ethnologists, Desmoulins,
originated the idea, which has subsequently been fully developed by
Agassiz, that the distribution of the persistent modifications of man
is governed by the same laws as that of other animals, and that both
fall into the same great distributional provinces. Thus, Australia;
America, south of Mexico; the Arctic regions; Europe, Syria,
Arabia, and North Africa, taken together, are each regions eminently
characterized by the nature of their animal and vegetable populations,
and each, as we have seen, has its peculiar and characteristic form of
man. But it may be doubted whether the parallel thus drawn will hold
good strictly, and in all cases. The Tasmanian Fauna and Flora are
essentially Australian, and the like is true to a less extent of many,
if not of all, the Papuan islands; but the Negritos who inhabit these
islands are strikingly different from the Australians. Again, the
differences between the Mongolians and the Xanthochroi are out of all
proportion greater than those between the Faunae and Florae of Central
and Eastern Asia. But whatever the difficulties in the way of the
detailed application of this comparison of the distribution of men
with that of animals, it is well worthy of being borne in mind, and
carried as far as it will go.

Apart from all speculation, a very curious fact regarding the
distribution of the persistent modifications of mankind becomes
apparent on inspecting an Ethnological chart, projected in such
a manner that the Pacific Ocean occupies its centre. Such a chart
exhibits an Australian area occupied by dark smooth-haired people,
separated by an incomplete inner zone of dark woolly-haired
Negritos and Negroes, from an outer zone of comparatively pale and
smooth-haired men, occupying the Americas, and nearly all Asia and
North Africa.

Such is a brief sketch of the characters and distribution of the
persistent modifications, or stocks, of mankind at the present day.
If we seek for direct evidence of how long this state of things
has lasted, we shall find little enough, and that little far from
satisfactory. Of the eleven different stocks enumerated, seven have
been known to us for less than 400 years; and of these seven not
one possessed a fragment of written history at the time it came into
contact with European civilization. The other four--the Negroes,
Mongolians, Xanthochroi, and Melanochroi--have