to the negro.  But perhaps the most characteristic pygmies are found in Africa.  The little Bushmen and Hottentots are low types of the Negrito stock, and they lead us to the lowest men of all, the Akkas of the West Congo region.  It is difficult for us to realize how utterly degenerate and apelike these pygmies are.  The jaws are disproportionately large as compared with the cranium or brain-case, and project to a degree which brings the skull very close to that of the higher apes; while in mental respects, in the absence of dwellings, and in many other ways they prove to be the lowest of all mankind,—­veritable brutes in form and mode of life.

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Without a full series of photographs before us the foregoing sketch of the various races of men cannot make us fully acquainted with all the strange varieties of the human body, but it will suffice to establish two fundamental results.  While all men agree in the possession of certain features which set them apart from other members of the primate order, they differ among themselves in such a way as to fall into four well-marked subdivisions branching out from a common starting-point.  Furthermore, in each of these primary groups the subordinate types arrange themselves also in the manner of branches arising from a common limb.  This is the relation that we have earlier found to be a universal one throughout the animal kingdom, and science believes that it indicates everywhere an evolutionary history—­an actual development along different lines of descent of forms which have a common starting-point and ancestry.

The second principle is perhaps even more significant:  when we review the many races from the Caucasian to the dwarf Negrito, we traverse a downward path which will bring us inevitably to the higher apes.  In our survey of human races, we have passed from the Caucasian, with the largest brain and cranium and with straight jaws well underneath the brain-case, to the pygmy with a relatively small brain, with huge projecting jaws and with prominent ridges over the eyes; one step more along that path would bring us to the gorilla or the chimpanzee.  The array of lower primates, from the lemur to the gorilla, gives a series of forms exhibiting a progressive advance in respect to the size of the brain and cranium, and a gradual retreat of the jaws to a position underneath the cranium; and one step further brings us to man.  In a word, these two lines join—­in fact, they are directly continuous.  There is a far smaller difference between the lowest man and the highest ape than we have been accustomed to suppose.

Thus in general terms, it can justly be said that process of evolution which developed the first man from its ape-man progenitor seems to have continued during subsequent ages.  Spreading out in diverging lines of evolutionary descent no less clearly than they have in geographical respects, certain races have far surpassed their fellows of a lower order, which, like the brute pygmy, remain nearer the common structural form from which all men have sprung.