We are therefore left to deal with the two remaining classes, the yellow and the white. The oldest, that is to say apparently the least changed, of these is the yellow
race, and perhaps their most typical representatives are the Chinese. The type is a sufficiently familiar one. ‘The skull of the yellow race is rounded in form. The oval of the head is larger than with Europeans. The cheek-bones are very projecting; the cheeks rise towards the temples, so that the outer corners of the eyes are elevated; the eyelids seem half closed. The forehead is flat above the eyes. The bridge of the nose is flat, the chin short, the ears disproportionately large and projecting from the head. The colour of the skin is generally yellow, and in some branches turns to brown. There is little hair on the body; beard is rare. The hair of the head is coarse, and, like the eyes, almost always black.’[41] In the present day the different families of the globe have gone through the changes which time and variety of climate slowly bring about in all; and the yellow race has not escaped these influences. While some of its members have by a mixture with white races or by gradual improvement, reached a type not easily distinguishable from the European, others have, through the effect of climate, approached more nearly to the characteristics of the black family. We may, however, still class these divergent types under the head of the yellow race, which we consequently find extending over a vast portion of our globe. Round the North Pole the Eskimo, the Lapps, and the Finns form a belt of people belonging to this division of mankind. Over all Northern and Central Asia the various tribes of Mongolian or Turanian race inhabiting the plains of Siberia and of Tartary, and again the Thibetans, the Chinese, Siamese, and other kindred peoples of Eastern Asia, are members of this yellow family. From the Malay peninsula the same race has spread southward, passing from land to land over the countless isles which cover the South Pacific, until they have reached the islands which lie around the Australian continent, the islands of _Polynesia_ in the South Pacific, and have mingled with the negro race that had preceded them there and that remains unmixed in the _Melanesian_ islands. The Maoris, the inhabitants of New Zealand, belong to this yellow race; and the Australians, _perhaps_, represent a mixture of negro and yellow races. In all, this division of mankind covers an immense portion of the globe stretching from Greenland in a curved line, through North America and China, downwards to New Zealand, and again westward from China through Tartary or Siberia, up to Lapland in the north of Europe. And it must be added that many anthropologists consider the red races of America only a variety of this wide-spread yellow race.