antchouria to Siam, Thibet,
and Northern Hindostan, is continuously inhabited by men, usually of
short stature, with skins varying in colour from yellow to olive; with
broad cheek-bones and faces that, owing to the insignificance of the
nose, are exceedingly flat; and with small, obliquely-set, black eyes
and straight black hair, which sometimes attains a very great length
upon the scalp, but is always scanty upon the face and body. The
skull is never much elongated, and is, generally, remarkably broad
and rounded, with hardly any nasal depression, and but slight, if any,
projection of the jaws.
Many of these people, for whom the old name of MONGOLIANS may be
retained, are nomades; others, as the Chinese, have attained a
remarkable and apparently indigenous civilization, only surpassed by
that of Europe.
At the north-western extremity of Europe the Lapps repeat the
characters of the Eastern Asiatics. Between these extreme points, the
Mongolian stock is not continuous, but is represented by a chain of
more or less isolated tribes, who pass under the name of Calmucks and
Tartars, and form Mongolian islands, as it were, in the midst of an
ocean of other people.
The waves of this ocean are the nations for whom, in order
to avoid the endless confusion produced by our present
half-physical, half-philological classification, I shall use a new
name--XANTHOCHROI--indicating that they are "yellow" haired and "pale"
in complexion. The Chinese historians of the Han dynasty, writing
in the third century before our era, describe, with much minuteness,
certain numerous and powerful barbarians with "yellow hair, green
eyes, and prominent noses," who, the black-haired, skew-eyed, and
flat-nosed annalists remark in passing, are "just like the apes from
whom they are descended." These people held, in force, the upper
waters of the Yenisei, and thence under various names stretched
southward to Thibet and Kashgar. Fair-haired and blue-eyed northern
enemies were no less known to the ancient Hindoos, to the Persians,
and to the Egyptians, on the south of the great central Asiatic area;
while the testimony of all European antiquity is to the effect that,
before and since the period in question, there lay beyond the Danube,
the Rhine, and the Seine, a vast and dangerous yellow or red haired,
fair-skinned, blue-eyed population. Whether the disturbers of the
marches of the Roman Empire were called Gauls or Germans, Goths,
Alans, or Scythi
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