but of descent from the
high to the low. Passing northwards, we meet, where the lichen-covered
land projects into the frozen ocean, with the diminutive Laps, squat,
ungraceful, with their flat features surmounted by pyramidal skulls of
small capacity, and, as a race, unfitted for the arts either of peace or
war. We meet also with the timid Namollas, with noses so flat as to be
scarce visible in the women and children of the race; and with the
swarthy Kamtschatkans, with their broad faces, protuberant bellies, and
thin, ill-formed legs. Passing southwards, we come to the negro tribes,
with their sooty skins, broad noses, thick lips, projecting jawbones,
and partially-webbed fingers. And then we find ourselves among the
squalid Hottentots, repulsively ugly, and begrimmed with filth; or the
still more miserable Bushmen. Passing eastwards, after taking leave of
the Persian and Indian branches of the Caucasian race, we meet with the
squat Mongolian, with his high cheek bones set on a broad face, and his
compressed, unintellectual, pig-like eyes; or encounter, in the Indian
Archipelago or the Australian interior, the pitiably low Alforian races,
with their narrow, retreating foreheads, slim, feeble limbs, and
baboon-like faces. Or, finally, passing westward, we find the
large-jawed, copper-colored Indians of the New World, vigorous in some
of the northern tribes as animals, though feeble as men, but gradually
sinking in southern America, as among the wild Caribs or spotted
Araucans; till at the extremity of the continent we find, naked and
shivering among their snows, the hideous, small-eyed, small-limbed,
flat-headed Fuegians, perhaps the most wretched of human creatures. And
all these varieties of the species, in which we find humanity "fallen,"
according to the poet, "into disgrace," are varieties that have lapsed
from the original Caucasian type. They are all the descendants of man as
God created him; but they do not exemplify man as God created him. They
do not represent, save in hideous caricature, the glorious creature
moulded of old by the hand of the Divine Worker. They are
fallen,--degraded; many of them, as races, hopelessly lost. For all
experience serves to show, that when a tribe of men falls beneath a
certain level, it cannot come into competition with civilized man,
pressing outwards from his old centres to possess the earth, without
becoming extinct before him. Sunk beneath a certain level, as in the
forests