Here is the sort of thing that used to pass for science when people talked about “the races of man.” It comes from an article in Good Health, the magazine “conducted by J. H. Kellogg, M.D.,” whose lasting effect on our unhealthily health-obsessed American culture can hardly be overestimated. I was about to say that today we would find this article very offensive; but Dr. Oswald’s nod to the “official version” suggests he expected his statements to offend a great number of people even in 1891. At any rate, it gets very ugly, and I don’t blame anybody for not wanting to read it at all; but if you’d like to see the flimsy foundations on which scientific racism was built, Dr. Oswald probably gives you a fair sample. The full article is much longer, and as you might expect it delves deeply into Papuans’ eating habits.
International Health Studies.
By Felix L. Oswald, M.D.
24.—Papua.
The Immigration Committees of such States as Colorado and Tennessee ought to call attention to the fact that in every part of the world, mountaineers, and especially the inhabitants of wooded mountains, are superior to their kinsmen of the treeless plains. “Physically superior” would probably be the official version, but that qualified adjective implies a good many mental and moral advantages.
Take the contrast between a freedom-worshiping Circassian highlander and a cheese-worshiping Calmuck of the Steppes; yet both are members of the Turanian, or Mongol, family of nations. The swaggering, frivolous Gascon, and the proud and prudent native of the Scotch hill-counties, are both Celts; the servile Muscovite, and the unconquerable Montenegrite, are both Slavs.
The aboriginal population of Papua, or New Guinea, presents a still more striking case in point. The island is, next to Australia, the largest on the globe, and is situated east of the deep ocean-channel known as “Wallace’s line,”—the dividing line between two regions of widely different zoological characteristics. No part of the globe, not even Hindostan itself, abounds in more varied forms of animal life than the island of Borneo,—the home of the orang, the gibbon-ape, and the wild cow; but of its hundreds of different mammals, only two species, a small panther-cat and a variety of wild hog, have found their way to the land of the Papuans. When Captain Vandyne visited New Guinea in 1793, the natives had no horses, cattle, sheep, goats, or domestic fowls. They had not even dogs, and their hunters had to rely on the acuteness of their own senses. It seems incredible that the island should have been colonized by the natives of the Malay Archipelago, who would certainly not have left all their household pets behind, nor failed to introduce their handicrafts and methods of agriculture. At certain times of the year, violent gales blow across the Indian Ocean in a northeasterly direction, and it seems by no means impossible that at some remote period the west coast of Papua was settled by shipwrecked natives of the African continent. The inhabitants of the east coast are clearly akin to the aborigines of Australia.
But on both sides of the island the descendants of those immigrants have improved on the original stock. The Papuans are quite as black as the average darky of the vast table-lands east of Senegambia; they have the long arms and gorilla fists, and even the frizzled hair, of the Ethiopian. But of that hair they have at least a good supply, and before a picked specimen of a Papuan highlander the prettiest native of negro land stands like a baboon before a black demi-god. The bulbous snout nose has got straightened out; the lower jaw has begun to form a chin; the hideous blubber lips have become smaller and finer; the pig eyes have acquired a human expression, and can flash in twinkles of humorous merriment or gleams of proud defiance. The average hight has increased about three inches. Men of six feet, or six feet two, are found among every tribe of the west-coast mountains.