The Negro | Page 3

a matter of fact we cannot take such extreme and largely fanciful
stock as typifying that which we may fairly call the Negro race. In the
case of no other race is so narrow a definition attempted. A "white"
man may be of any color, size, or facial conformation and have endless
variety of cranial measurement and physical characteristics. A "yellow"
man is perhaps an even vaguer conception.
In fact it is generally recognized to-day that no scientific definition of
race is possible. Differences, and striking differences, there are between
men and groups of men, but they fade into each other so insensibly that
we can only indicate the main divisions of men in broad outlines. As

Von Luschan says, "The question of the number of human races has
quite lost its _raison d'être_ and has become a subject rather of
philosophic speculation than of scientific research. It is of no more
importance now to know how many human races there are than to
know how many angels can dance on the point of a needle. Our aim
now is to find out how ancient and primitive races developed from
others and how races changed or evolved through migration and
inter-breeding."[1]
The mulatto (using the term loosely to indicate either an intermediate
type between white and black or a mingling of the two) is as typically
African as the black man and cannot logically be included in the
"white" race, especially when American usage includes the mulatto in
the Negro race.
It is reasonable, according to fact and historic usage, to include under
the word "Negro" the darker peoples of Africa characterized by a
brown skin, curled or "frizzled" hair, full and sometimes everted lips, a
tendency to a development of the maxillary parts of the face, and a
dolichocephalic head. This type is not fixed or definite. The color
varies widely; it is never black or bluish, as some say, and it becomes
often light brown or yellow. The hair varies from curly to a wool-like
mass, and the facial angle and cranial form show wide variation.
It is as impossible in Africa as elsewhere to fix with any certainty the
limits of racial variation due to climate and the variation due to
intermingling. In the past, when scientists assumed one unvarying
Negro type, every variation from that type was interpreted as meaning
mixture of blood. To-day we recognize a broader normal African type
which, as Palgrave says, may best be studied "among the statues of the
Egyptian rooms of the British Museum; the larger gentle eye, the full
but not over-protruding lips, the rounded contour, and the good-natured,
easy, sensuous expression. This is the genuine African model." To this
race Africa in the main and parts of Asia have belonged since
prehistoric times.
The color of this variety of man, as the color of other varieties, is due to
climate. Conditions of heat, cold, and moisture, working for thousands
of years through the skin and other organs, have given men their
differences of color. This color pigment is a protection against sunlight
and consequently varies with the intensity of the sunlight. Thus in

Africa we find the blackest men in the fierce sunlight of the desert, red
pygmies in the forest, and yellow Bushmen on the cooler southern
plateau.
Next to the color, the hair is the most distinguishing characteristic of
the Negro, but the two characteristics do not vary with each other.
Some of the blackest of the Negroes have curly rather than woolly hair,
while the crispest, most closely curled hair is found among the yellow
Hottentots and Bushmen. The difference between the hair of the lighter
and darker races is a difference of degree, not of kind, and can be easily
measured. If the hair follicles of a China-man, a European, and a Negro
are cut across transversely, it will be found that the diameter of the first
is 100 by 77 to 85, the second 100 by 62 to 72, while that of the Negro
is 100 by 40 to 60. This elliptical form of the Negro's hair causes it to
curl more or less tightly.
There have been repeated efforts to discover, by measurements of
various kinds, further and more decisive differences which would serve
as really scientific determinants of race. Gradually these efforts have
been given up. To-day we realize that there are no hard and fast racial
types among men. Race is a dynamic and not a static conception, and
the typical races are continually changing and developing,
amalgamating and differentiating. In this little book, then, we are
studying the history of the darker part of the human family, which is
separated from the rest of mankind by no absolute physical line, but
which nevertheless forms, as a mass, a social group distinct