Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon].

  • Robert Chambers
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    317/408 page 309
    Mongolian form; while it is only as the child advances to maturity, that the oval face, the arched forehead, and the marked features of the true Caucasian, become perfectly developed.”* The leading characters, in short, of the various races of mankind, are simply representations of particular stages in the development of the highest or Caucasian type. The Negro exhibits permanently the imper- fect brain, projecting lower jaw, and slender bent limbs, of a Caucasian child, some considerable time before the period of its birth. The abori- ginal American represents the same child nearer birth. The Mongolian is an arrested infant newly born. And so forth. All this is as respects form ;f but whence colour? This might be supposed to have depended on climatal agencies only; but it has been shewn by overpowering evidence to be independent of these. In further considering the matter, we are met by the very remarkable fact that colour is deepest in the least perfectly deve- loped type, next in the Malay, next in the Ame- * Lord’s Popular Physiology, explaining observations by M. Serres. + Conformably to this view, the beard, that peculiar attribute of maturity, is seanty in the Mongolian, and scarcely exists in the Americans and Negroes.
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image