in at the bottom of a tiny
pit or hair-follicle. The familiar wavy hair of white men owes its
character to the fact that the individual elements are formed by the skin,
not as pencil-like rods, but as flattened cylinders. They are oval or
elliptical in cross-section, and when they emerge from the skin they grow
into a long spiral. If, now, the hair is formed as a very much flattened
rod about one-half as wide in one diameter as in the other, it curls into
a very tight close spiral and gives the frizzly or woolly head-covering of
the Papuan and of the Negro.

In the next place, the shape of the cranium is a character of much value.
This is determined as the proportion between the transverse diameter of
the skull above the ears to the long diameter, namely, the line that runs
from the middle of the brow to the most posterior point of the skull. In
the so-called "long-headed" or dolichocephalic races, the proportion is
seventy-five to one hundred, while in those forms that have more rounded
or brachycephalic heads, like the Polynesian and the black pygmy, the
relation is eighty-three to one hundred. The cranial capacity again varies
considerably, from nine hundred cubic centimeters to twenty-two hundred
cubic centimeters. Many striking variations are also found in the
projection of the jaws. A line drawn from the lower end of the nose to the
chin makes a certain angle with the line drawn from the chin to the
posterior end of the lower jaw; if the jaw projects very greatly, this
angle will be much less than when they do not. In most of the Caucasian
peoples, the lines meet at an angle of eighty-nine degrees, or very nearly
a right angle, but in some of the lower races the figure may be only
fifty-one degrees. Additional characters of the teeth and of the palate
are also taken into account, and have proved their utility. Finally, the
nose exhibits a wide range of variation from the small delicate feature of
the Chinaman to the large, well-arched nose of the Indian. It may be
hollowed out at the bridge instead of arched; again, it may be nearly an
equilateral triangle in outline, as in the Veddahs, and the nostrils may
open somewhat forward instead of downward. As many as fifteen distinct
varieties of the human nose have been catalogued by Bertillon.

These are the principal bodily characters which the anthropologist uses to
distinguish races and by their means to determine the more immediate or
remote community of origin of