Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/343

] Britain and on the Continent, and may therefore be taken to imply that the Basque-speaking peoples are to be looked upon as a fragment of the race which occupied the British Isles, and the area west of the Rhine and north of the Alps, in the Neolithic age.

The Basques of the present day are, as might be expected from the many invasions they have undergone, by no means uniform; but the researches of Dr. Broca prove that the real Basque stock was small in stature, dark in complexion, with black hair and eyes, and with a long head; the other elements in the population, as at present constituted, having been contributed by the Celtic, and long afterwards by the Gothic and English invaders. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt as to this small, dark-haired people being identical with the ancient Iberians of history, who have left their name in the Iberian peninsula as a mark of their former dominion in the west. Thus, by a chain of reasoning purely zoological, we arrive at the important conclusion that the Neolithic inhabitants of the British Isles belong to the same non-Aryan section of mankind as the Basques, and that in ancient times they were spread through Spain as far to the south as the Pillars of Hercules, and as far to the north-east as Germany and Denmark.

The Iberic population of the British Isles was apparently preserved from contact with other races