type, with its tendency to infantile characters due to the early closing of the cranial sutures, is apt to throw off dwarfed forms in an occasional way.  At any rate, in Africa there are several groups of pygmies in the Congo region, as well as the Bushmen and allied stocks in South Africa.  Then the Andaman Islanders, the Semang of the Malay Peninsula, the Aket of eastern Sumatra, the now extinct Kalangs of Java, said to have been in some respects the most ape-like of human beings, the Aetas of the Philippines, and the dwarfs, with a surprisingly high culture, recently reported from Dutch New Guinea, are like so many scattered pieces of human wreckage.  Finally, if we turn our gaze southward, we find that Negritos until the other day inhabited Tasmania; whilst in Australia a strain of Negrito, or Negro (Papuan), blood is likewise to be detected.

Are we here on the track of the original dispersal of man?  It is impossible to say.  It is not even certain, though highly probable, that man originated in one spot.  If he did, he must have been hereditarily endowed, almost from the outset, with an adaptability to different climates quite unique in its way.  The tiger is able to range from the hot Indian jungle to the freezing Siberian tundra; but man is the cosmopolitan animal beyond all others.  Somehow, on this theory of a single origin, he made his way to every quarter of the globe; and when he got there, though needing time, perhaps, to acquire the local colour, managed in the end to be at home.  It looks as if both race and a dash of culture had a good deal to do with his exploitation of geographical opportunity.  How did the Australians and their Negrito forerunners invade their Austral world, at some period which, we cannot but suspect, was immensely remote in time?  Certain at least it is that they crossed a formidable barrier.  What is known as Wallace’s line corresponds with the deep channel running between the islands of Bali and Lombok and continuing northwards to the west of Celebes.  On the eastern side the fauna are non-Asiatic.  Yet somehow into Australia with its queer monotremes and marsupials entered triumphant man—­man and the dog with him.  Haeckel has suggested that man followed the dog, playing as it were the jackal to him.  But this sounds rather absurd.  It looks as if man had already acquired enough seamanship to ferry himself across the zoological divide, and to take his faithful dog with him on board his raft or dug-out.  Until we have facts whereon to build, however, it would be as unpardonable to lay down the law on these matters as it is permissible to fill up the blank by guesswork.