And now let us hark back to southern Asia with its two reservoirs of life, India and China, and between them a jutting promontory pointing the way to the Indonesian archipelago, and thence onward farther still to the wide-flung Austral region with its myriad lands ranging in size from a continent to a coral-atoll.  Here we have a nursery of seamen on a vaster scale than in the Mediterranean; for remember that from this point man spread, by way of the sea, from Easter Island in the Eastern Pacific right away to Madagascar, where we find Javanese immigrants, and negroes who are probably Papuan, whilst the language is of a Malayo-Polynesian type.

India and China each well-nigh deserve the status of geographical provinces on their own account.  Each is an area of settlement; and, once there is settlement, there is a cultural influence which co-operates with the environment to weed out immigrant forms; as we see, for example, in Egypt, where a characteristic physical type, or rather pair of types, a coarser and a finer, has apparently persisted, despite the constant influx of other races, from the dawn of its long history.  India, however, and China have both suffered so much invasion from the Eurasian northland, and at the same time are of such great extent and comprise such diverse physical conditions, that they have, in the course of the long years, sent forth very various broods of men to seek their fortunes in the south-east.

Nor must we ignore the possibility of an earlier movement in the opposite direction.  In Indonesia, the home of the orang-utan and gibbon, not to speak of Pithecanthropus, many authorities would place the original home of the human race.  It will be wise to touch lightly on matters involving considerations of palaeo-geography, that most kaleidoscopic of studies.  The submerged continents which it calls from the vasty deep have a habit of crumbling away again.  Let us therefore refrain from providing man with land-bridges (draw-bridges, they might almost be called), whether between the Indonesian islands; or between New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania; or between Indonesia and Africa by way of the Indian Ocean.  Let the curious facts about the present distribution of the racial types speak for themselves, the difficulties about identifying a racial type being in the meantime ever borne in mind.

Most striking of all is the diffusion of the Negro stocks with black skin and woolly hair.  Their range is certainly suggestive of a breeding-ground somewhere about Indonesia.  To the extreme west are the negroes of Africa, to the extreme east the Papuasians (Papuans and Melanesians) extending from New Guinea through the oceanic islands as far as Fiji.  A series of connecting links is afforded by the small negroes of the pygmy type, the so-called Negritos.  It is not known how far they represent a distinct and perhaps earlier experiment in negro-making, though this is the prevailing view; or whether the negro