an opprobrium to an
ethnological collection to possess a single skull which is not bisected
longitudinally--until the angles and measurements here mentioned,
together with a number of others of which I cannot speak in this place,
are determined, and tabulated with reference to the basicranial axis as
unity, for large numbers of skulls of the different races of Mankind,
I do not think we shall have any very safe basis for that ethnological
craniology which aspires to give the anatomical characters of the crania
of the different Races of Mankind.

At present, I believe that the general outlines of what may be safely
said upon that subject may be summed up in a very few words. Draw a
line on a globe from the Gold Coast in Western Africa to the steppes
of Tartary. At the southern and western end of that line there live
the most dolichocephalic, prognathous, curly-haired, dark-skinned of
men--the true Negroes. At the northern and eastern end of the same line
there live the most brachycephalic, orthognathous, straight-haired,
yellow-skinned of men--the Tartars and Calmucks. The two ends of this
imaginary line are indeed, so to speak, ethnological antipodes. A line
drawn at right angles, or nearly so, to this polar line through Europe
and Southern Asia to Hindostan, would give us a sort of equator, around
which round-headed, oval-headed, and oblong-headed, prognathous and
orthognathous, fair and dark races--but none possessing the excessively
marked characters of Calmuck or Negro--group themselves.

(FIGURE 29.--Sections of orthognathous (light contour) and prognathous
(dark contour) skulls, one-third of the natural size. 'a b', Basicranial
axis; 'b c, b1 c1', plane of the occipital foramen; 'd d1', hinder
end of the palatine bone; 'e e1', front end of the upper jaw; 'T T1',
insertion of the tentorium.)

It is worthy of notice that the regions of the antipodal races are
antipodal in climate, the greatest contrast the world affords, perhaps,
being that between the damp, hot, steaming, alluvial coast plains of
the West Coast of Africa and the arid, elevated steppes and plateaux of
Central Asia, bitterly cold in winter, and as far from the sea as any
part of the world can be.

From Central Asia eastward to the Pacific Islands and subcontinents
on the one hand, and to America on the other, brachycephaly and
orthognathism gradually diminish, and are replaced by dolichocephaly and
prognathism, less, however, on the American Cont