tury b. o., to the first centuries of our era, which all speak for the
unalterable constancy of the negro type such as it
is in our own days. We see that it was not only,
the color, hut the peculiar type that struck the
ancients; and which the Romans, for instance,
knew quite as - minutely as any modern ethnologists.
Petronius, who lived under the emperor
Fig. 91.
Nero, describes, in his Novel, three vagabond
literary men who, having taken passage in a
ship on the Mediterranean, suddenly discover that
it belongs to a merchant on hoard, whom two of
them had previously robbed. Dreading his revenge,
N egro H e a d .
(Pulszky Coll.)
one of them says:
“ Eumolpus, being a scholar, has certainly ink with him: let ns therefore dye ourselves
from top to toe, and as Ethiopian slaves we shall be at his command without fear of torture;
for by the change of color we shal.1 deceive our enemies.’’ But Geiton exclaims in reply:
“ as if color alone could transform our shape! for many things have, to conspire that the lie
might be maintained under any circumstances. Of can wo till our lips with an ugly swelling
? can we crisp our hair with an iron ? and mark our forehead with scars ? and distend
our shanks into a curve ? and draw our heels down to the earth ? and change our beard into
a foreign fashion ? — artificial color besmears the body, but does not change it.” 2U
Voltaire has somewhere wittily remarked, “ the first white man
who beheld a negro must have been greatly astonished; hut the
reasoner who claims that the negro comes from the white man
astonishes me a great deal more.”
Negroes, however, are not the only unartistical race. We have
already spoken of the Shemites among the whites, and we must add
to them the Turanian or Turk-Tartar family of nations; that is to say,
the Hungarians proper, the Turks and Turkomans, the Finns, and
some migratory tribes of southern Siberia; none of them ever having
produced any painter or sculptor. But not even all the Japetides are
endowed with artistical tendencies. The Celts and Slavonians, and
among the Teutonic races, the Scandinavians, had no national art.
The imagery of their epics and lyrics is neither picturesque nor
sculptural; their buildings, pictures and statues, are Characterized by
no peculiar type, and are either the works of foreigners, or servile
imitations of imported models. The Turks and Celts have, at least,
a peculiar feeling for ornament, for decorative art and harmony of
colors; hut all the other nations mentioned above have never felt
that inward impulse which prompted even the semi-civilized Toltecan
m T. P e t r o n i i A r b i t r i , Satiricon, cap. CII: — compare the extract from V ir g il in Types
of Mankind (p. 2 5 5 ) ; and the quotation from Logman’s Fables: (p. 24 6 ) which is but the
Arabian or Persian dress of the same idea in AEsor’s.