Are the African Natives as far removed from the beasts as the Europeans, and do they share equally with the Europeans this great human distinction of ability to think?

The belief, at, one time commonly held, that in morphological development and physical appearance the Bantu stand nearer in the scale of evolution to our common ape-like ancestors than do the white people does not seem to be warranted by facts.  Careful investigations by trained observers all over the world have shown that the various simian features discernible in the anatomy of modern man are found fairly evenly distributed amongst advanced and backward races.

The so-called prognathism of the Bantu has been cited as a racial mark denoting comparative nearness to the brutes, but when it is noted that anthropologists differ among themselves as to what constitutes this feature, whether it is to be measured from points above or below the nose or both, and when we are informed in some text books that while the negroes are prognathous, bushmen must be classed with Europeans as being the opposite, that is, orthognathous,[1] and when, added to this, we learn from other quarters that white women are, on the average, more prognathous than white men,[2] then the significance of this distinction, which in any case is not regarded as being relative to cranical capacity, is seen to be more apparent than real.

Extreme hairiness of body, on the other hand, which might well be taken as a simian or vestigial character, is seldom met with in the Bantu, but is equally common among Europeans and Australian aboriginals and is found particularly developed in the Ainu of Japan.  The texture also of the African’s hair is less like that of the hair of the man-like apes than is the hair of the European.  The proportions of the limbs of the Europeans seem, on the average, to be nearer to the supposed prototype of man than those of the Bantu.  The specifically human development of the red lips is more pronounced in the African than in the European,[3] and if there is anything in what has been called the “god-like erectness of the human carriage” then it must be admitted that the Bantu women exhibit a straightness of form which may well be envied by the ladies of civilisation.

It is generally accepted that the African Natives have a bodily odour of their own which is sui generis in that it is supposed to be different from that of other human races.  Some early travellers have compared it with the smell of the female crocodile, and many people believe it to be a racial characteristic denoting a comparatively humble origin and intended by nature as a signal or warning for the rest of human kind against close physical contact with the African race.  A recent student of the Negro question in America gives it as his opinion that this odour is “something which the Negroes will have difficulty in living down."[4] To most Europeans this smell seems to be more or less unpleasant but it must not be forgotten