Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/439

 Rh ago, I owed to Professor Virchow's kindness—it is seen that whole northern, but also some parts of southern Bavaria contain an overwhelming proportion of clear-eyed and fair-haired people; some parts up to seventy-five per cent, of grey and blue eyes. Even the Bavarian Palatinate, which lies next to the French frontier, is blue and grey-eyed, in its various districts, to the extent of 59 to 66 per cent.; fair-haired from 53 to 64 per cent.; whiteskinned from 80 to 91 per cent.

In other parts of Southern Germany there are large patches of territory in which the mass of the people are clear-eyed and fair-haired, alternating with patches of different characteristics. Sometimes the plain and the mountain form the line of division; the darker aboriginal natives having been driven on to the hills. This is a subject on which it is difficult to say all that might be desirable in the space of a letter.

I am afraid there is here and there a curious tendency, among some learned men, of crowding out the Teuton in a manner scarcely consistent with careful research. I will not treat here on the Fenian or Fianna Question in Ireland, on which a mass of evidence could be given on the Germanic side, which cannot be lightly dismissed. I was rather startled when finding in Professor Rhys's Celtic Britain a note, headed "Belgae", with this curt sentence:—"Nor is there any reason to suppose that the Belgae were Teutons."

Yet Cæsar, who fought the Belgians; who knew them; who had them interviewed; who heard their own statements through interpreters, declares plainly that "most of the Belgians had sprung from the Germans, having crossed the Rhine in olden times, settled in the country on account of its fertility, and driven out the Gauls" ("Sic reperiebat: plerosque Belgas esse ortos a Germanis, Rhenumque antiquitus transductos, propter loci fertilitatis ibi consedisse; Gallosque, qui ea loca incolerent, expulisse").

The result of this German conquest may be seen to the present day. Nearly two-thirds of the Belgians belong to