Caucasic Race

Caucasic Race, one of the main divisions of mankind, so named by Blumenbach, who regarded the aborigines of the Caucasus as the most typical branch of that division. As contrasted with the other two divisions (yellow, black lank-haired, flat-featured Mongol, and black, woolly-haired, prognathous Negro), the ideal Caucasic man is fair, with light or brown hair and regular features. But two sub-types are distinguished by Huxley and others: the Xanthochroi ("fair-coloured"), assumed to represent the true primitive Caucasic stock, characterised by flaxen or light brown wavy hair, dolichocephalic skull (long from occiput to glabella), florid complexion, large, straight or slightly aquiline nose, large blue or hazel eyes, tall stature (mean, 5 feet 8 or 9 inches); and the Melanochroi ("dark-coloured"), characterised by black and rather straight hair, brachycephalic skull (short or round), pale or sallow complexion, small nose, black eyes, medium height (5 feet 6 inches). Originally the fair type is supposed to have occupied the higher latitudes, at least in Europe (Scandinavia, North Germany, Baltic provinces), while the dark was grouped round the Mediterranean lands (North Africa, West Asia, South and West Europe, especially Iberia and parts of Britain); but for countless ages interminglings have been incessantly going on, so that at present the great bulk of the Caucasic peoples show almost everywhere endless shades of transition between the two extremes, evident not only in all the great divisions and their minor branches, but even in family circles and in the individual (light hair and dark eyes; florid complexion and black hair often seen in same person). On the ethnical border-lands both merge imperceptibly in the conterminous Mongolic and Negro types, as through the Finns and Lapps in the north, through the Turkomans in the east, through the Gallas, Somals, and Tibbus in the south. But the average Caucasic man (and in the present mixed state of the human species it is now everywhere a question of averages) can still be easily distinguished from the average Mongol and Negro. The Caucasic is also the most numerous, the most widespread, and in every respect the leading division of mankind. The Mongols are popularly supposed to be the most numerous, but this is owing to the exaggerated estimates of the population of China (the chief Mongolic domain), and to the common mistake of regarding all Asiatics as Mongols, many millions being really Caucasians. Caucasic speech also belongs mainly to the inflecting, that is, to the highest order, almost the only exceptions being the Basque of the Western Pyrenees, and perhaps most of the idioms spoken by the aborigines of the Caucasus. Apart from these, the three great Caucasic linguistic families (all inflecting) are the Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic, whose collective domain now comprises most of Southern Asia between the Bay of Bengal and the Mediterranean, nearly all North Africa between Sudan and the Mediterranean, nearly all Europe, a great part of South Africa, most of Australasia, all North and Central America, with but slight exceptions, and by far the greater part of South America. The domain thus comprises about half the population of the globe, say 720,000,000, all of Caucasic speech, but not all of Caucasic stock, as shown by the Aryan-speaking Negroes of the New World, the numerous Finno-Tatar peoples now assimilated in speech to the Aryan Slavs, and so on. Allowing 20,000.000 for these, there still remain some 700,000,000 who belong, both in physical type and speech, to the Caucasic division of mankind.