Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition

[500] important than those which distinguish the human races. The fact that they are arranged in different genera, species, and varieties does not lessen the value of the comparison; for the point in question is just to know whether nations, races, and what have also been called families of men, such as the Indo-Germanic, the Semitic, etc., do not in reality correspond to the families, genera, and species of monkeys. Now the first great subdivisions among the true monkeys (excluding Makis and Arctopitheci) are founded upon the form of the nose, those of the new world having a broad partition between the nostrils, while those of the old world have it narrow. How curious that this fact, which has been known to naturalists for half a century, as presenting a leading feature among monkeys, should have been overlooked in man, when, in reality, the negroes and Australians differ in precisely the same manner from the other races; they having a broad partition, and nostrils opening sideways, like the monkeys of South America, while the other types of the human family have a narrow partition and nostrils opening downward, like the monkeys of Asia and Africa. Again, the minor differences, such as the obliquity of the anterior