Manawatu Herald TUESDAY. JUNE 21, 1921. THE CRADLES OF MANKIND.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2292, 21 June 1921, Page 2

Manawatu Herald TUESDAY. JUNE 21, 1921. THE CRADLES OF MANKIND.

LECTURING at the Royal Institution on Darwin’s theory of the origin of man, Professor Keith said anthropologists still agreed with Darwin that the 1,000 million souls which constituted the present population of the world were the produce of a common stock. From discoveries of extinct types of fossil man it was known that in former epochs there had been many rival types of primitive humanity, hut all had now gone save the winning type —the ancestral stock of modern races. There was also agreement that of all the surviving representatives the Australian aborigines and their near .cousins, the extinct natives of Tasmania, came nearest to the original type from which all modern races had arisen. In ordinary speech we measure human races as high or low, according to the degree to which they can accommodate themselves to European civilisation. Anthropologists apply another standard; they measure races according to whether their features are of a primitive or of a new kind. The peppercorn ringlets and thick lips of the negro are just as new or recent acquisition as are the fair skin and hair and narrow nose of the North European. Anthropologists are of opinion that three parts of the world have served as cradles of new forms of humanity—in times which may be called recent in a geologist’s sense of time. These three cradles arc Europe—the North-Western part, where the fair European has come into existence; North-East Asia, the home and cradle of the Mongol; and Central Africa, mainly the Congo basin, the cradle and home of the typical negro. Two other subsidiary cradles have to be recognised—one stretching from the Levant to Afghanistan, the cradle of a race distinguished by the size and prominence of nose, and India itself, where dark skins have been fitted to features more or less European.

OUR SECONDARY INDUSTRIES,

SOME interesting figures as to the secondary industries of the Dominion were quoted by the Minister of Industries and Commerce (the Hon. E. P. Lee) in an interview recently. “The 1919 statistics,” he said, “showed that New Zealand manufactories provided work for nearly 07,000 people, that they'had produced in that year a value of. £lO,791,073, and had fixed assets of the value of £25,500,000. The number of establishments was 2,251 in 1891, 3,103 in 1901, and 3,377 in 1919. In 1891 the number of productive employees was 25,633, iu 1901 41,197, and in 1919 01,729. We had," lie maintained, “passed the. stage of considering whether it was wise to establish industries here. A\ e had established industries, and some of them were in a very large way. A\e had in our cities a very large population engaged in our manufacturing indus-

tries; and for these people there was probably no other outlet of employment. He hoped and believed that the Government could, with advantage to the people as a whole, encourage these industries. He would point out that it was not always the case that a man was being penalised when he paid a little more for an article. It was rather, from his point of view, a case of keeping the money in the country and obtaining an article superior to and more lasting than the imported article.”