The Negro in the new world / by Harry H. Johnston ; maps by J.W. Addison.
- Johnston, Harry H. (Harry Hamilton), Sir, 1858-1927.
- Date:
- 1910
Licence: In copyright
Credit: The Negro in the new world / by Harry H. Johnston ; maps by J.W. Addison. Source: Wellcome Collection.
11/544
![PREFACE BOOKS are often synonymous with boredom nowadays. We have so much more to read through than our parents read before us [if we are to keep abreast of the ever-widening scope of world-interests] that the sight of the printed page is to many people almost a provocation to anger, suggesting a further strain on the already over-taxed eyes and over-stuffed brain. The literature of the almost immediate future may quite possibly be reduced to the pictographs from which writing began. A novelist, a traveller, an anthro- pologist, or an historian will be required to say what he has to say in a series of pictures—photographs and diagrams—and the letterpress will be confined to little more than descriptive titles and occasional verbal explanations. In the year 1910, however, I have tried to tell in words as well as pictures the story of the Negro in THE New World, as much for my own education as for that of others. For those who are too busy to do more than glance at the pictures, and perhaps read through this preface (which is as much as fifty per cent of modern reviewers are able to accomplish, amid the rain of books in the English language), I will here summarise the conclusions to be deduced from my opinions and (I think) from my array of evidence. In chapter I. I have set forth the theory that the Negro should be regarded as a sub-species of the perfect human type—Homo sapiens; that his sub-specific differences from the Caucasian or White man, the Yellow or Mongolian, are largely, but not entirely, in the direction of his being slightly more akin to the lowlier human stock which preceded in time and development the existing Homo sapiens. He is consequently in some features a little more primitive than are the non-Negro peoples of Europe, Asia, and America ; and in others less so ; or more highly specialised, more divergent from Homo primigenius than is the Mongol or the Caucasian. In any case he is distinctly superior in human evolution to the Australoid, the lowest in development of all existing divisions of Homo sapiens. But although the Negro still possesses pithecoid characteristics long since lost by the Caucasian and the Mongol, although he comes of a stock which has stagnated in the African and Asiatic tropics for uncounted, unprogressive millenniums, he has retained dormant the full attributes of sapient humanity. He has remarkable and ungaugeable capabilities. It has been possible, over and](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24854530_0013.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
