The black slaves of America were all descended from typical negros brought from the western part of Africa, and they provide us with adequate illustrations of Ethiopians as a group.  In them the stature is above the average of men in general, specifically about five feet ten inches.  The short jet-black hair is strikingly different from the head covering of the other great groups of human races; each individual hair is so flat in cross-section that it curls into a very tight close spiral, and this brings about a frizzly appearance of the whole head covering.  There is little or no beard, the skin is soft and velvety and of various shades approaching black in color.  The skull is long, the cheek bones are small, but the most distinctive characteristics of the head are found in the apelike ridges over the eyes and in the very broad flat nose which projects only slightly and turns up so that the nostrils open forward to a marked degree, while in the jaws there is an astonishing divergence from the Caucasian condition in the great protrusion which causes the angle at the chin to be about sixty degrees.

The warlike Zulus and other peoples of Southern and Central Africa are perhaps the most characteristic races in this division.  Their relatives are found to the northward as far as the Sahara desert, along the southern borders of which they have spread out to the eastward and westward.  Fusion with other races has taken place along this border so that many of these northern tribes are much lighter than the Zulus in the color of the skin.  But many relatives of the taller African negro are found in other parts of the world, namely in Australia, and in New Hebrides and New Caledonia—­islands to the north and east of this continent.  The Papuan of New Guinea is a typical negro in all true respects, with strongly marked Ethiopian characteristics, though there are some differences which are transitional to the more aberrant natives of Melanesia, which includes many archipelagos like the Fiji, Bismarck, Marshall, and Solomon islands.  Undoubtedly the most degenerate member of the tall negro division is the Australian native, the so-called “blackfellow.”  The bulbous nose and the well-grown beard mark him off from the typical stock, but his obvious relationship to this is indicated by the low brain capacity, the prominent ridges over the eyes, and the heavy projecting jaws.

Taking up the other division of the so-called Ethiopian race, constituting the Negrito section, we may begin with its Oceanic members.  The natives of the Andaman Islands, the Kalangs and the Sakais of Java and neighboring regions, and the Aetas of the Philippine Islands agree in a dwarfed stature of four feet or a little over, in their yellowish brown skin color, a round head, and woolly reddish-brown hair.  They, too, possess large ridges over the eyes and extremely prominent jaws, and in these latter characteristics particularly we see evidences of their relationship