Origin of the White Man.

Waikato Times, Volume XXII, Issue 1806, 2 February 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

Origin of the White Man.

Tueke may be remain? of Stone Age white?, but tfiere aye no certain lemaus of white cavages of a low order. We may well doubt if theie ever were any white savages; it is more likely that the white men were developed late in the race-history of the world from ancestors already far on in civilization ; in fact, that this civilization, with its improved supply of food, its better housing and clothing, its higher intellectuality, was one main factor in the development of the white type. Here, however, it must be remembered that there is not a white race in the sense in which there is ft Carib race or an Andaman race. It includes several race-types, and even the same languages, such as English or German, may be spoken by men as blonde as Danes or as daik as Sicilians. The fairhaired Scandinavian type has something of the definiteness of a true race ; but as one travels pouth theie appear, not well-defined sub-races, but darkening gmdations of bewildeiing complexity. The most icasonable attempt to solve thid intricate problem is Professor Huxley's view that the white race is made up of fair-whites of the Northern or Scandinavian type and daik whites, who are the rebnlt ot ages of mixture between the fair whites and the daiker nations, though it is perhaps hardly prudent to limit these dark ancestors to one variety, as he does. If now we cannot trace the white man down to the low level of primitive savageiy, neither can we assign to him the great upward movement by which the barbarian passed into civilization. It is not to the Ayian of Persia nor to the Semitic of Syria Inat the art of writing belongs which brought on the new era of culture. The Egyptian, whose hieroglyphics may be traced passing irom picture into alphabet, had his race alhe3 in people of North Africa, especially the Berbers of the north coast —people whom no elasticity of the ethnologic system would biing into the white lace. Of the race-type of the old Babylonians, who shaped likewise rude pictures into wedge-phone Ac signs, we know but little as yet; at any rate, their speech was not Aryan, and the comparisons of Lenormant and Sayce have given some ground for connecting it with the Turanian language, belonging to a group of nations of whom one, the Chinese, had in remote antiquity worked out a civilization of which the development of an imperfect phonetic writing formed part. If the great middle move in culture was made, not by any branch of the white race, but by races now represented by the Egyptian and the Chinese, it is not less clear that these nations came to the limit of their developing power. The white races had in remote antiquity risen high in barbaric culture when their contact with the darker nations who invented writing opened to them new intellectual paths. The Greeks found in the ancient Egyptian theology the gods of the four elements, but they transferred this thought from theology to philosophy and developed from it the theory of elements and atom-, which is the basis of modem chemistry. They found the Babylonians building terraced temples to the seven planets in the order of their periods, and this conception again they transferred from religion to science, founding on itthedootrineof planet spheres which grew into mathematical astronomy. It may moderate our somewhat over-weening of our powers to remember that the white races cannot claim to be the original creators of literature and Bcience, but from remote antiquity they began to show the combined power of acquiring and developing culture which has made them dominant among mankind. —Nature.