is a cultural influence which
co-operates with the environment to weed out immigrant forms; as we
see, for example, in Egypt, where a characteristic physical type, or
rather pair of types, a coarser and a finer, has apparently persisted,
despite the constant influx of other races, from the dawn of its long
history. India, however, and China have both suffered so much invasion
from the Eurasian northland, and at the same time are of such great
extent and comprise such diverse physical conditions, that they have,
in the course of the long years, sent forth very various broods of
men to seek their fortunes in the south-east.

Nor must we ignore the possibility of an earlier movement in the
opposite direction. In Indonesia, the home of the orang-utan and gibbon,
not to speak of Pithecanthropus, many authorities would place the
original home of the human race. It will be wise to touch lightly on
matters involving considerations of palaeo-geography, that most
kaleidoscopic of studies. The submerged continents which it calls from
the vasty deep have a habit of crumbling away again. Let us therefore
refrain from providing man with land-bridges (draw-bridges, they might
almost be called), whether between the Indonesian islands; or between
New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania; or between Indonesia and Africa
by way of the Indian Ocean. Let the curious facts about the present
distribution of the racial types speak for themselves, the
difficulties about identifying a racial type being in the meantime
ever borne in mind.

Most striking of all is the diffusion of the Negro stocks with black
skin and woolly hair. Their range is certainly suggestive of a
breeding-ground somewhere about Indonesia. To the extreme west are
the negroes of Africa, to the extreme east the Papuasians (Papuans
and Melanesians) extending from New Guinea through the oceanic islands
as far as Fiji. A series of connecting links is afforded by the small
negroes of the pygmy type, the so-called Negritos. It is not known
how far they represent a distinct and perhaps earlier experiment in
negro-making, though this is the prevailing view; or whether the negro
type, with its tendency to infantile characters due to the early
closing of the cranial sutures, is apt to throw off dwarfed forms in
an occasional way. At any rate, in Africa there are several groups
of pygmies in the Congo region, as well as the Bushmen and allied stocks
in South Africa. Then the Andaman Islande