Early steps in human progress / by Harold J. Peake.

  • Harold John Edward Peake
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Early steps in human progress / by Harold J. Peake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    are due solely to natural causes. At first people were prone to distinguish these races apart only by the colour of the skin, and spoke of the black Negro race of Africa, the yellow or Mongol race of East Asia and the Red Man of America. We know now that the colour of the skin is by no means always the best criterion of race, for it varies much among individuals in the same race, and in the same individual at different times according to age and the degree of recent exposure to the rays of the sun. There are other characters that are equally if not more important, though not always so readily apparent, and it is upon an aggregate of such characters that the definition of a race must depend. The chief of these characters are stature, pigmentation, head form, facial features and hair, though there are J j o other minor characters that are sometimes of import¬ ance. While stature is to some extent an individual trait, depending to a certain degree upon health and nutri¬ tion during the years of growth, nevertheless there are races, members of which are habitually tall, though short individuals occur. Other races are short—some so small as to be reckoned pigmies. Still, in spite of individual variations, two fairly large samples from the same race would probably have the same average stature, and differ, in this respect, from similar samples taken from members of other races. In stature, how¬ ever, we must not reckon only the height, but the girth and, above all, bodily proportions. Thus some races are spare and bony, while others tend to be thick-set and corpulent, while the length of the neck is very vari¬ able and seems to be a racial rather than an individual character. Colour, or pigmentation as it is called, is a surer guide to racial distinction, and this is of three kinds.