Chapter II: THE SEMITIC STOCK.--First entered Arabia from Africa. 1. The

Arabian Group. Early divisions and culture. The Arabs. Physical
types; mental temperament; religious idealism. 2. The Abyssinian
Group. Tribes included. Period of migration. Condition. 3. The
Chaldean Group. Tribes included. The modern Jew.

The leading race in all history has been the White Race. It is proper therefore that it should have our chief attention in the study of the distribution of the species. By some writers it is called the Caucasian, by others the Japetic, and by others again the European race--all inaccurate terms, for the race never originated in the Caucasus, never descended from the mythical Japetus or Japheth, and when first it appeared on the horizon of history, its most extensive possessions and the seats of its highest culture were not in Europe, nor yet in Asia, but in Africa.

_Scheme of the European Race: South Mediterranean Branch._

(Extinct peoples in _italics_.)

{ { _Numidians_, _Getulians_,
{ { _Libyans_, _Maurianians_,
{ { _Guanches_, Berbers, Rifians,
{ 1. Libyan Group. { Zouaves, Kabyles, Tuareks, Tibbus,
{ { Ghadumes, Mzabites, _Ghanatas_,
I. { { _Etruscans_, _Amorites_,
Hamitic { { _Assyrians_, _Hittites_. (?)
Stock. {
{ 2. Egyptian Group. { Copts, Fellaheen.
{
{ { Gallas, Somalis, Danakils,
{ 3. East African Group. { Bedjas, Bilins,
{ { Afars, Khamirs.

{ { _Himyarites_, _Sabeans_,
{ 1. Arabian Group. { _Nabotheans_, Arabs,
{ { Bedawin, Ehkilis.
II. {
Semitic { { Amharnis, Tigris,
Stock. { 2. Abyssinian Group. { Tigrinas, Gheez,
{ { Ethiopians, Harraras.
{
{ 3. Chaldean Group. { Israelites, Arameans, Samaritans.

This statement may astonish you, and I know no writer who has properly emphasized the fact that the white race is geographically and historically an _African_ race. I have calculated with some care the area of its control of the three continents when their inhabitants first became known. The results are these: The white race then possessed:[49]

In Asia 2,500,000 square miles.
In Europe 3,000,000 “ “
In Africa 3,500,000 “ “

These figures vindicate for the race the title I have given it--Eurafrican.

More than this: the purest and finest physical specimens of the white race always have been and _still are_ found native to African soil; and the leading nations of the race, those who have most contributed to its glory, and to the advance of the civilization of the world, either have resided in Africa or can be traced to it as their ancestral home.

_Types of the White Race._--Let us first define the characteristics, physical and mental, of the white race.

In one of its pronounced types, the individuals are blondes, tall in stature, the eyes blue or grey, the hair yellow or reddish and wavy, the beard full, the nose narrow and prominent (leptorhin), the chin well defined, the jaws straight (orthognathic), the skull long (dolichocephalic) or medium, the eyes narrow (microsemes), the supra-orbital ridges rather prominent, the face moderately oval.

This is the typical appearance of the ancient Goths, Teutons and Scandinavians, and of the modern Swedes and Germans. It was also that of the ancient Libyans, and is still preserved in the greatest purity among their descendants in Morocco and Algiers; hence I shall call it the Libyo-Teutonic type.

A second type is also tall in stature, but red-haired, freckled complexion, the face and forehead broad, the cheek bones prominent, the eyes nearly circular (megasemes), the jaws and mouth projecting (prognathic), the skulls broad and high (brachycephalic-hypsistenocephalic), the chin square and firm.

This is the type we see preserved in some of the Highland Scotch clans, and in the “Tuatha de Danann” of Ireland, recalling the large-limbed and red-haired “Caledonians” of Tacitus, and those ancient Britons who, under Queen Boadicea, withstood so valiantly the Roman legions. The Gauls or Cimbri of Belgium and northern France were of this type, and hence it has been called the “Cymric” type.

But there is a second Celtic type, also of vast antiquity, claimed by some to be the only pure form. In it the skull is also broad--broader than the former variety; but the stature is undersized, the hair and eyes dark-brown, the complexion brunette, the orbits rounded, the forehead full. Modern representatives of this type are the dark clans of the Highlanders, the Irish west of the river Shannon, the Manx, the Welsh, the Bretons of France, the Auvergnats, the Walloons of Belgium and the Ladins of eastern Switzerland.

The most ancient known seats of these dark Celts were in extreme western Europe and the isles adjacent. This location points them out as one of the oldest peoples in Europe, whether their presence is explained by immigration or autochthonous descent. Part of their possessions in early historic times was in the Iberian peninsula, along the Cantabrian mountains in northern Spain. Here they were in immediate contact with members of the white race of a different type, the Euscarians or Basques.

In them the stature is medium, the form symmetrical, hair and eyes are dark but rarely black, the complexion dark and sallow, the face oval, and the skull long, the length being in the posterior (occipital) region. Although the last mentioned is an important distinction between the Celtic and the Euskaric skull, there is unquestionably a closer resemblance physically between the Celts and Basques, who speak totally diverse tongues, than between the Celts and Cymri, whose tongue was the same.

In these four typical groups from the extreme west of Europe we find sharp contrasts within limited areas, among peoples some of whom are unquestionably consanguine. Two of the groups, the Teutonic and Cymric, belong in color and hair and stature to the blonde type, but differ profoundly in shape of skull and facial bones; the two others belong to the brunette type, but differ equally in osseous character. In general physical traits the Celtic differs less from the Euskaric than from the Cymric type, as was recognized by the historian Tacitus.

These facts bring out an ethnic principle of importance--the variability of traits within the racial limits--and this becomes more marked as the race is higher in the scale of organic development. No race remains closer to its type than the Austafrican, none departs from it so constantly as the Eurafrican. Wherever we find the unmixed white race we find its blonde and brunette varieties, its prognathic and orthognathic jaws, its long-skulled and broad-skulled heads.[50] To establish genealogic schemes exclusively upon these differences, as has been the work of so many living anthropologists, is to build houses of cards.

These contrasts are presented to us daily. The researches of Virchow, De Candolle, Kollmann, and many others, prove that in the same city, in the same family, the children to-day are born brunettes or blondes, dark or light eyed, to some degree broad or narrow skulled, with but partial reference to their parents’ peculiarities. The aberrant types are usually about twenty per cent. of the whole. It seems generally to have been so in the unmixed white race wherever located.

All such variations, however, remain strictly within the racial lines, and are not approximations to other races. Each race retains to-day the characteristics of its earliest representatives, so far as we know them.

_Primal Home of the White Race._--Where should we look for these earliest representatives, for the primal home of the Eurafrican race? The usual answer has been “in Asia,” but now that answer is rejected by all the younger and most earnest ethnologists.

A steady stream of information has of late been contributed by the sciences of linguistics, palæontology, pre-historic archæology and racial anatomy, sufficient to convince even the skeptical that not Asia, but the western water-shed of the Eastern Continent, was the area of characterization which developed this race with its marked physical traits and singular mental endowments. In the previous lecture I have shown you that man himself probably came into being as such within the limits of that region which I have described as Eurafrica; and as its conditions were such as to foster his transformation from some inferior primate, so they continued, though profoundly altered, to favor his growth, as they still do continue to-day. It is by no mere accident or result of political manœuvres that western Europe has for two thousand years produced the mightiest nations and greatest minds of the earth.

The discussion of the precise locality where in Europe the primitive man developed into the white race has occupied many learned pens in the last score of years. But by nearly all of them the discussion has been limited to the birthplace of merely the Aryan linguistic stock--an unfortunate narrowness of view, which has prevented a comprehensive grasp of the question at issue.[51]

The Aryan peoples present by no means the only, nor yet the purest types of the white race. I have seen quite as noble blondes among the Kabyles of the Djurjura as in Denmark, quite as handsome brunettes among the Basques of the Pyrenees as among the Celts of France or the Italians. A broad construction of the question must include all these, and in this spirit I approach it.

We must search for the first abode, the primitive “area of characterization” of the white race:

1. Where its most ancient residence and greatest numbers were in earliest historic times.

2. Where the prehistoric remains prolong that residence most remotely back.

3. Where the earliest forms of linguistic structure continue to exist in large communities.

4. Where its purest types are retained in considerable numbers.

5. Where the climatic conditions are favorable to the physical traits of the race.

If we can select a locality in which all of these arguments unite, the cumulative evidence is so powerful that we may consider the question settled.

I have already shown that at the dawn of history the white race possessed either in Europe or Africa a far larger area than in Asia, and possessed it practically exclusively. The most recent researches in the pile dwellings of the Swiss lakes and the plain of the Po show that the same race inhabited them from the classic period of Greece to far back in the stone age.

The most ancient shell-heaps or kitchen-middens on the shores of Portugal contain skulls of the peculiar type of the Basques of to-day. The hiatus or gap which was once supposed to exist between palæolithic and neolithic culture in France has been bridged over by numerous observations, showing that the same race continued to live and grow there.[52] As for language, every linguist recognizes the agglutinative type of the Basque, and the semi-agglutinative character of the Berber as more antique forms than the inflectional caste of Aryan or Semitic tongues. Nowhere else do white tribes speak an agglutinative tongue, except a few in the Caucasus, where we know they settled at a comparatively recent period.

The purest types of the whites in any large number have always been found in Western Europe and Northwestern Africa. There the blondes were represented by the Suevi, the Goths, the Vandals, the Cymri, the Berbers; the brunettes by the Euskarians, the Celts, and the native Italic tribes. In the Orient, the Parsees, the high-caste Brahmins, the Siagosch of the Hindu Kusch, and some Caucasian tribes, have by close intermarriage retained in a measure the traits of the race; but confessedly not in the same distinctness as the nations of Western Europe; nor do the Semitic peoples of Asia present the purity of the type with anything like the distinctness of the descendants of the Libyans in the valleys of the Atlas. Finally, we do not anywhere in Asia find the physical conditions favorable to the development of the white race--the moist, cool, cloudy climate, the extensive shady forests covering broad areas of low elevation, with absence of malaria and diminished demand on the chylopoietic organs.

_Early Migrations and Subdivisions._--It is not necessary to suppose that the different peoples of the race developed themselves from one central point. The contrary is more probable.

Beginning at the extreme West of Europe, and its appendix North Africa, the race pursued an easterly course, divided by the great intervening sea of the Mediterranean into two sections, which for convenience I designate as the “North Mediterranean” and the “South Mediterranean” branches, though it will be seen that these geographical limits are not to be taken absolutely.

The North Mediterranean branch embraces as its most important member the Indo-Germanic peoples. When first heard of in history, this stock extended along the shores and islands of Europe from Cape Finisterre to the Gulf of Finland, occupying all of Central Europe and much of Asia Minor, the regions of Modern Persia, and at a later date the southern vales of the Himalayas. Its northern limits have always been in contiguity with the Asian or Yellow race. Stretch a line on the map from Singapore to St. Petersburg, continue it to the Atlantic, and you have roughly the ethnic boundary which has ever separated the races, and does so to-day.

In western Europe, south of the Aryac was the Euskaric stock, occupying central Spain, central and southern France, portions of Italy, and various islands in the Mediterranean.

As speaking a language of a different family from the prevailing inflectional type of the race, it is spoken of as “allophyllic.” It does not stand alone in this respect. Some of the white Caucasian tribes speak similar agglutinative tongues, and it is supposed by some that the ancient Pictish, Illyrian, Lycian, Van, and Etruscan were of similar character. Probably many such languages obtained which are now extinct.

The South Mediterranean Branch consists of two related stocks, which have been called the Hamitic and the Semitic. These names are not objectionable, in so far as they indicate a distant genealogic unity, still recognizable, between the two branches; but should not in any way be accepted as acknowledging as historic facts the myth of the Deluge and their origin in Asia. The reverse is true. The migrations of both stocks have been from west to east, and the two great branches of the White Race entering Asia, the one by the Bosphorus and the second by the Isthmus of Suez, encountered each other after thousands of years of separation in the region where the venerable myth locates their point of departure.

A. THE SOUTH MEDITERRANEAN BRANCH.

I shall begin my survey of the race and its distribution with the South Mediterranean branch, as that which has been the more important of the two in history, controlling by far the greater territory, and developing the earlier and more potent civilizations. It has ever been, and still is, the leader in intellectual acumen, and the monuments of its achievements, both in the realms of thought and action, remain unrivalled in the world. With great propriety, therefore, it claims our first attention.