Written records cover but a short last chapter in human history. To grasp
the results of the contact of races, it is necessary to push back the curtain
of history and trace earlier events; for prehistoric race migrations determined
the present locations of the races in the Old World and peopled the New World.
For many thousands of years, the three great divisions of mankind (white,
yellow and black) existed substantially as we find them at the dawn of
civilization. In the earlier period, as in the later, portions of these primary
divisions of the human family changed their abodes, carrying with them in
intellect and culture the germs of their later development.
No continent is inhabited exclusively by one race; even Europe is not
altogether a White man's continent. The Mongol's descendants are in the north
(Finns and Lapps) and in the east (Bulgars, Huns and Turks), while in the
extreme south (southern provinces of Portugal, Spain and Italy), there is
considerable infusion of Negro blood.
Nor is Asia occupied wholly by the yellow man; for this vast continent has
for ages been the meeting place of the three races, and a large proportion of
its inhabitants are their mongrel offspring. Africa is not, nor in the past has
it been, a black man's land. The Hamites, who in earliest record occupied its
northern shores and eastern prolongation, were not Negroes. The true Hamite is
Caucasian. The Hamitic domination of North Africa yielded to the conquering
Aryan, the Aryan to the Arab Semite, and the Semite, in turn, to the modern
European --the English, French, Spanish and Italian-- all of whom are of the
white race. (See notes at the end of this chapter.)
Because of the absence of written record, we are not to infer that the
determining of prehistoric migrations is a task yielding doubtful results. Race
movement, particularly that of the Caucasian, is determinable by race culture
which has everywhere way marked Caucasian migrations; whilst the physical
modification of the peoples with whom the White man has come into contact
furnishes also satisfactory data. Language, too, may be offered as evidence.
But such evidence, while valuable, is not always "No; for the white man
has often imposed his language upon the non-white and, in turn, he has, in some
instances, acquired the tongues of other races. When two races come into
permanent contact, there is blood amalgamation, creating a mongrel race; but
the language of the one or the other will prevail. "No language is mixed
in its inner mechanism."
Mankind grouped in race divisions has ever been in a state of flux, moving,
counter-moving, conquering, amalgamating. Just as in recorded history we know
that the Caucasian has been in motion, restless, daring, seeking unknown lands
and dominating other peoples; so, in the vast period before the light of
record, we can infer that such were his characteristics, for it is certain that
no race has suddenly assumed world domination. Such pre-eminence implies ages
of preparation.
Civilization dawns upon the Nile and the Euphrates, and, after some
centuries, its center is shifted to Greece. But before Socrates and Plato
taught, the Eastern Aryans (Nordics) had transplanted Caucasian culture along
the Indus and the Ganges, and had penetrated through India to Oceanic. Rome,
Carthage and Greece struggled for supremacy and Rome prevailed. After five
centuries of conflict, Rome's scepter passed to Germanic hands and since that
time, apart from the temporary ascendency of the Moslem Arab, Teutonic peoples
have dominated progress. Thus is briefly summarized the shifting of higher
culture centers for the past ten thousand years, all of which owe origin and
sustenance to Caucasian peoples.
But scientific research and exploration enable us to peer beyond this short
period in human history into the untold ages of which there is no written
record. Anthropology, archaeology, and philology have given up their secrets to
the extent of enabling scientists to deduce reasonable conclusions as to race
origins and to follow more certainly race movements. The constancy of skull
formation, identifying the race type of skeletal remains; the remote antiquity
of the implements of primitive man found in his caves and burial mounds; the
dispersion throughout vast areas of allied language groups give data no less
certain than written history in determining early race movements.
While the present peoples of Europe, which for convenience were groped
together as the Caucasian race, have left their impress by a modification of
the physical type of the races with which they have dwelt, and to a certain
extent have modified their speech, yet the most conspicuous waymark of their
migrations is not their mongrel offspring, nor the spread of the Caucasic
tongue, but their great stone monuments, their burial mounds, and the ruins of
their ancient cities. Hybrid groups have migrated to localities which have not
been occupied by the true Caucasian, and, likewise, peoples who have learned a
Caucasic speech; but the white man's cultural centers cannot have arisen in any
portion of the world where the White man has not been. However, these cultural
centers of the early white man nowhere exist apart from mongrel Caucasic
peoples, while speech also often attests the white man's earlier presence.
Great numbers of the megalithic monuments, which mark generally the
distribution of the early Mediterranean race, are in North Africa and in North
and West Europe. From these centers the monuments or well defined burial mounds
extend in two routes across Asia; a northern route through Siberia, Manchuria
and Korea into Japan, and an southern route beginning in North Africa and
passing through Asia Minor and Arabia into India and Oceania. Similar monuments
are found elsewhere in territory occupied by the early white man, but the
routes indicated mark their main extensions.
The ancient monuments, the use of which was to mark the burial places of the
early Caucasian, exist in two types, the cell and the block, which have
developed into the modern family vault and the tombstone. The block type was
used to designate the location of the cell type, which was covered by a mound.
The value of these widely dispersed prehistoric monuments as waymarks in
following the migrations of the early White man is recognized by ethnologists.
J. McMillan Brown calls them "a Caucasian track across the earth." (Maori
and Polynesian, p.7) E.B. Taylor speaks of the "rude stone monuments
which may be traced in a remarkable line on the map." (Anthropology,
p. 349.) A.H. Keane, one of the foremost British ethnologists, places great
emphasis upon their value. "More important, especially in connection with
early migrations, is the subject of the geographical distribution of the
neolithic monuments. Broadly speaking...all the stone structures of the cell and
block types were mainly confined in Asia to the south (Naga, Khasi and Jaintea
Hills, the Deccan south of the Vindyha Range, Iranian, Asia Minor, Moab, Syria,
Palestine, Arabia); in Africa to Mauritania taken in its widest sense
(Tripolitana to the Atlantic); in Europe to the south (Crimea, Mediterranean
Islands, Iberia); the west (Gaul, Belgium, and the British Isles); and the
north (Scandinavia)." (Ethnology, p. 133.)
This megalithic engineering skill is not a stage in the development of the
several races. It is not found among blacks or yellows. The Asiatics, in whose
countries these monuments are found, are the mixbreed descendants of the
megalithic builders, or later intruders.
The monuments along the ancient migrant routes show that the Caucasian of
the stone age, like his descendants of today, was a maritime race, the only
race that has not halted at the sea.* The monuments generally adhere to the
seas or to minor war courses. Water is an effective barrier to the Negro's
advance. The yellow man is not so helpless as the black, but, unmixed with the
white, he has not proved himself a water migrant. The White man only is
undeterred by ocean wave.
*(The Nordic race is master of the sea as it is master
of the land, but the Mediterranean race has distinguished itself upon the
water. The Phoenecians were Mediterraneans. The Polynesians in colonizing the
remote islands of the Pacific Ocean proved that race to be among the world's
greatest sailors, but the Polynesians were clearly not of the yellow or black races,
though at the present time they may show admixture with both of these races.)
The white man of the later stone age reached the Pacific
Ocean at two points some three thousand miles apart. From northern Europe
through Asia to Japan; from northern Africa through Arabia and India to the
East Indies and to furthest Polynesia. In remote Easter Island he placed his
monuments of stone. Between the points where the neolithic whites reached the
Pacific there is also evidence of early Caucasian megalithic culture. From
Japan, "the megalithic Caucasian seagoing race...unMongolized, went south
into Polynesia," (Maori and Polynesian, p. 60, J. MacMillan Brown.)
while the Caucasian of the southern route, migrating northwards along the coast
of Asia and the adjacent islands, reached the Philippines. In doing this, the
migrants of the southern rote cut across the line of movement of those of the
northen route. Thus, after thousands of years of separation, Caucasic groups
met in the islands of the Pacific.
In the islands nearer the mainland, the Caucasian type has been highly
modified by inter-breeding with the yellow and black races, but in the more
distant islands of Polynesia the Caucasian type is strikingly maintained. There
the inhabitants "have a singularly European appearance," and
"early voyagers broke into raptures over the beauty of the women and the
stalwart grace of the men." However, there is also race admixture in the
remotest islands of Polynesia. The most that can be said with regard to the
purity of race is that Caucasian blood predominates. "There are traces of
the Negroid even among the upper classes." (A. H. Keane, Ethnology,
p. 283.) This Negro blood has come from the Asiatic branch of the Negro race
which is now almost extinct as a pure type on the mainland, but abounds in
Oceania, and whose earlier domain must have "included the whole of
Polynesia, as far as Easter Island in the extreme east, Hawaii and New Zealand
in the extreme north and south." (ibid., 283) The racial status of the inhabitants
of the islands south and southeast of Asia may possibly be summarized by
stating that in the Melanesians group of islands Negro blood predominates,
while in the Polynesian group the inhabitants are yet fundamentally Caucasian.
But Mongolian blood is also widely dispersed in this area.
The Negro's migrations in early times were probably determined by pressure
from the whites, as his later movements have been. The white man's contact with
the Negro dates from a distant prehistoric age. Such contact has not been restricted
to the western or African branch of the Negro race, but has extended in the
eastern (Asiatic or Oceanic) branch as well. It will be necessary for the
reader to keep in mind the prolonged contact of the various races. A well known
British authority dealing with Negro history says, "About 10,000 years ago
(at a guess), a Caucasian race allied to modern Libyans and Syrians took
possession of the lower Nile Valley, supplanting and absorbing the
aborigines...These ancestors of the great Egyptian peoples, together with
allied tribes, pressed down on Negro Africa, mingling freely with the black and
brown, to whom they imparted their Neolithic civilization. The pressure of the
intrusive Caucasians gradually drove the pure blood Negro peoples into the more
equatorial regions of Africa, and even propelled them away from the eastern
prolongation of African (Somali- and Gali-land) toward the Congo Basin, Lake
Tchad, Nigeria and Gaines." (Sir Harry Johnston, Britain Across the
Seas, p. 18.)
But it is held by able authorities upon the prehistoric domains of the
various races that occupation of North Africa by Caucasian peoples long
antedates ten thousand years. The Egyptians of the great civilization were a
White, not a colored people. The Negroid features so prevalent among the
present inhabitants of Egypt are the result of the white Egyptian's absorption
of Negro blood.
Caucasian pressure upon North Africa was not hurried; it required thousands
of years to shift the true Negro to his present locations; nor was it complete,
for the white race throughout this period interbred with the Negro, creating a
mixbreed population which inhabits the most of Africa north of the equator and
whose southern migrations at a later date brought them along the East Coast to
Cape Town, at the extreme south of the continent.
As the present-day French are recruiting Negroes in Africa to use in their
warfare, so in Egypt, "In the sixth dynasty, about 2000 B.C., the
celebrated inscriptions of Prince Uni make mention of the Nashi, or Negroes,
who were levied and drilled by the tens of thousands for the Egyptian
army." (E. B. Taylor, Anthropology, p. 3) Evidence of the early use
of the Negro as soldier in the warfare of the whites implies still earlier and
extensile contact with that race. From this contact with the Caucasian the
Negro, in some degree, acquired Caucasian culture. He was taught the use of the
white man's weapons, and from t he white man received domestic animals.
"Egyptian civilizaton penetrated far and wide through Negro Africa. It may
have been almost instrumental in saving the Negro and the bushman from
relapsing into such a beastlike condition of life that, if much longer pursued,
it might have cut off this division of the human race from complete community
with us in all the attributes of humanity. From ancient Egypt the Negro and the
negroid derived all the domestic animals and cultivated plants he knew and made
use of (except, perhaps the dog), down to the coming of the modern Arabs and
Portuguese. From Egypt there gradually spread through Negro Africa religious
beliefs, the use first of stone and then of metal weapons, musical instuments,
the art of weaving, and possibly of canoe making or boat building." (Sir
Harry H. Johnston, Britain Across the Seas, pp. 28-30.)
It is an interesting study, this age-long retreat of the true Negro from his
home on the Nile to his present locations in the forests south of the Sahara,
the Congo Basin and the Atlantic littoral and hinterland of equatorial Africa.
Turning to the Asiatic branch of the Negro race, we find his dispersion
widespread. De Quatrefages assigns much latitude to the early domain of the
Negro on the Asiatic mainland. The degree northward of their occupation is a
matter of doubt, but there is certainly a Negroid fringe along much of the
southern coast, and there yet remain upon the mainland remnants of the Negro
race in the form of pygmies, though these latter are almost extinct. The mass
of the eastern branch inhabit the islands south and southeast of Asia. In these
islands there are also isolated groups of the pygmy type of Negro, such as that
people whom Flower calls an "infantile race" on the Andaman Islands,
and the Negroid of the Philippines. This dwarf people has somehow been left
behind in the course of evolution. The taller Negroids (Papuans) or
"mop-heads" of certain writers may have been differentiated from the
dwarf variety chiefly by evolution; certainly their type has been modified by
blood admixture with yellow and white. It is the Papuans whose numbers count
and whose geographical extension is important. Their blood exists in greater or
less degree in most of the inhabitants of Oceania. In physical type, the Papuan
is a better looking Negro than the West Coast African, but it is doubtful if
the mentality of the former is of higher grade than that of the latter.
The yellow race at an early time reached its present center of population in
southeastern Asia, and offshoots of that race, mixed more or less with
Caucasian blood, arrived in America. The important movements of the yellow man,
save the migrations to Early America, are historic rather than prehistoric, and
will be outlined in subsequent chapters.
Race, the descendants of a common ancestor. There is wide latitude in the
use of this term. Ethnologically it implies well marked spiritual and physical
attributes which are transmissible by the laws governing heredity, and which
serve to set apart, visibly, from the rest of mankind the group to which it is
applied. We speak of the human race, the Caucasian race, the English race, etc.
There is no flawless classification of the races of mankind. Such
classifications as exist need revision, but for the purposes of this book the
popular classifications are satisfactory. The "Caucasian race" is in
reality constituted of three well-marked divisions of mankind, one of which
(the Alpine) is clearly of Asiatic, not European origin. Nor is it certain that
the other two are of European origin. The Nordic, in its Teutonic variation, is
of European origin, but the basic stock from which it evolved may not have
originated in Europe, while the Mediterranean also is probably a migrant into
Europe.
Skin color, hair texture and form, skull shape and capacity, skeletal
proportions, and psychic predispositions, are the main criteria of race. The
pure races have had independent evolution from remote prehistoric ancestors.
Like thoroughbreds among the lower animals, the members of pure races will
breed true to type. In popular classification, based upon color, there are
three, sometimes five, races: White, yellow and black. The
so-called red and brown races may be considered mixed races or variations of
the white, yellow, or black.
The White Race (Caucasian) has three well-marked divisions: Nordic, Alpine and
Mediterranean. All blonds throughout the world are Nordics, or are mixtures
deriving their blond characteristics from the Nordic race. True blonds are
tall; fair complexioned; flaxen, red, or chestnut haired; blue, grey, or hazel
eyed. The Teutonic Nordic has a long skull; other Nordics are of shorter
stature and have rounder skulls. This race, throughout historic record, has
proved itself the "Master Race," giving to the world the Aryan
language, most of science, literature, and art. Imposing themselves upon
conquered peoples, branches of this race developed the ancient civilizations of
Persia, India, Greece, and Rome. It is everywhere at the present time,
especially in its Saxon and Frank representatives, the leader in modern
civilization. The Nordic race has furnished an overwhelming proportion of
soldiers, sailors, explorers, administrators, and inventors known to history.
It is not now a pure race except in restricted localities, as in Scandinavia
and portions of the Baltic Basin, being mixed, generally, in greater or less
degree, with the blond of other races. Americas of colonial descent are
fundamentally Nordic, while many Nordic immigrants have strengthened this
element in the American population.
The Alpine (of Asiatic origin) is a stockily built race with round skulls,
inhabiting most of Asia Minor, the most of Russia (there are many Nordics in
northwestern Russia), the most of the Balkans; mixed with the Nordic in the
northern half of Italy; the most of central France, with extensions into Brittany,
and along a narrow strip of the northern coast of Spain. Originally the Alpines
were a brunet race but are now mixed much with the Nordic, the mixtures having
a tendency to show the Nordic eye, though other Nordic characteristics may not
be evident. This race is credited with having initiated the age of metals in
Europe.
Mediterraneans, the small, dark race surrounding the shores of the
Mediterranean Sea but with western extensions to Great Britain and Ireland and
eastern extensions to India. This race underlies the Nordic in Great Britain,
Ireland, parts of France and Italy. There is an upper class of Nordics,
superimposed; at least partially, on the Mediterraneans in Portugal and Spain.
A keen witted, mentally agile race, distinguished in the arts.
These three races of Europe constitute what is popularly called the
Caucasian or European race. The three, led by the Nordic, especially so in
modern times, have contributed to civilization all its higher achievements.
While the Nordic race has been the main factor in developing civilization it
appears unfitted to complete successfully with the other favor the Nordic. In
order to maintain his social position he limits the number of his children.
Just as the Nordic is finally eliminated in intensive competition with the
other European races, so is the entire white race endangered when in
competition with the colored races.
Aryan, an early Nordic stock that, by conquest and culture, imposed its
language upon many peoples. It is not possible to identify with certainty any
living people as descendants of the early Aryan, but all Nordics are related,
directly or indirectly, to the ancient Aryan.
Teuton, a branch of the Nordic race which for two thousand years has played
the chief role in history and in civilization. Goths, Saxons, Jutes, Angles,
Franks, Lombards, Burgundians, Vandals, Suevi, Varangians, Swabians, Belgians,
Norsemen, and Danes over-ran Europe and conditioned modern civilization to
development along Teutonic lines.
The Black or Negro race exists in great purity in the forests south of the
Sahara, and in most of the Congo Basin; in the rest of Africa it is generally
mixed, though often but slightly, with Mediterranean offshoots in early times
(more recently with Nordics). Anciently this race occupied much of southern
Asia and its blood has modified the race type of many of the inhabitants along
the southern coast to, and beyond, India. In the Melanesian Islands south of
Asia it is found in comparative purity. Its blood exists in greater or less
degree in the Polynesian Islands.
The Yellow or Mongolian race has ethnic center int he southeast of Central
Asia, where it is found in comparative purity. Mixed with the white race it
extends across northern Asia from Japan to Finland and Lapland. Its blood is
everywhere discernible throughout southeastern Asia and in many of the islands
south of Asia.
Those who find it convenient to make additional classifications on the basis
of color define as Brown the most of north and northeast Africans, the
inhabitants of southern Asia Minor and southern Asia, together with many of the
islanders south of Asia. This race is largely Mediterranean or a mixture of
that stock with other peoples in its western extension, Mongoloid in its
eastern.
The Red races is the American Indian. It shows marked Mongolian affinities
in many of its representatives; its eastern tribes appear to be of Caucasian
derivation.
Anthropology (physical) - The science which treats of the physical structure
of man.
Archaeology - The science which treats of antiquities.
Civilization - "Civilization" is used in this treatise as a term
which includes the total of the white race's material and spiritual culture.
Racial "superiority" and "inferiority" are determined by
racial cultural contributions. The white man's cultural achievements is the
standard of comparison. Cultural potentialities of colored races are not denied
but demonstrated cultural capacities only are used in comparing one race with
another. It is assumed that the white race's relatively high culture is an
evidence of "specialized" racial characters in that race. Specialized
characters in any race are of later origin than "generalized" human
characters, consequently are less stable; and would tend to disappear in the
white man's mixbreed descendants.
Ethnology - The science which treats of the different natural races of man.
Negrophilist - Negro lover. This term is applied to certain whites in a
sense similar to the Negro's characterizing a member of his race as a
"white man's Negro."
Philology - The science which treats of languages.