hold especially the immense, almost continental, regions of Australia (New Holland) and New Guinea, and also the larger archipelagos, such as New Hebrides, Solomon Islands, Fiji (Viti) Archipelago—­that is, the western areas—­the north and east, Micronesia and Polynesia, were occupied by lighter-colored peoples.  So the first division into Melanesia and Polynesia has in latest times come to be of value, and the dogma once fixed has remained.  For the Polynesians are by many allied to the Malays, while the blacks are put together as a special ethnological race.

For practical ethnology this division may suffice.  But the scientific man will seek also for the blacks a genetic explanation.  The answer has been furnished by one of the greatest ethnologists, Theodor Waitz, who, after he had exposed the insufficiency of the accepted formulas, came to the conclusion that the differentiation of the blacks from the lighter peoples might be an error.  He denied that there had been a primitive black race in Micronesia and Polynesia; in his opinion we have here to do with a single race.  The color of the Polynesians may be out and out from natural causes different, “their entire physical appearance indicates the greatest variability.”  Herein the whole question of the domain of variation is sprung with imperfect satisfaction on the part of those travelers who give their attention more to transitions than to types.  Among these are not a few who have returned from the South Sea with the conviction that all criteria for the diagnosis of men and of races are valueless.

Analytical anthropology has led to other and often unexpected results.  It has proved that just that portion of South Sea population which can apparently lay the strongest claim to be considered a homogeneous race must be separated into a collection of subvarieties.  Nothing appears more likely than that the Negritos of the Philippines are the nearest relatives to the Melanesians, the Australians, the Papuans; and yet it has been proved that all these are separated one from another by well-marked characters.  Whether these characters place the peoples under the head of varieties, or whether, indeed, the black tribes of the South Sea, spite of all differences, are to be traced back to one single primitive stock, that is a question of prehistory for whose answer the material is lacking.  Were it possible to furnish the proof that the black populations of the South Sea were already settled in their present homes when land bridges existed between their territory and Africa, or when the much-sought Lemuria still existed, it would not be worth the trouble to hunt for the missing material.  In our present knowledge we can not fill the gaps, so we must yet hold the blacks of the Orient to be separate races.