Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/143

129 Finland are a people more or less allied to the Fins on its northern shore. De Quatrefages, who examined some skulls of Esthonians, discovered that one in three under his observation showed a well-marked prognathism. He says: ‘Orthognathism being considered one of the attributes of the white rice, the existence of a prognathism very frequent and very pronounced appears to me difficult to understand.’ He goes on to say: ‘It becomes easy if we admit that it (prognathism) was, if not general, at least very frequent in the race, which was the first people of Western Europe, and that it is still represented among us by their more or less mixed descendants.’ In order to explain the phenomena of the prognathous skull, he thus supposes the characteristic to be a most ancient one, and to have descended to individuals of the present European races from some very remote Mongol ancestors. These characters are still represented by certain Mongol tribes in Russia, who at a very early period may have extended further westward, or have been among the remote ancestors of the Esthonians and Fins, whose language at the present time is allied to the Ugrian.

This may be interesting to the ethnologist, but the ordinary reader may reasonably ask what it has to do with the Anglo-Saxon settlement. Eight skulls out of twelve from West Saxon graves were found by Horton-Smith to be orthognathous, one was mesognathous, and the other three were on the border of meso- and prognathisrn. Horton-Smith found himself in a difficulty in being unable to see where the prognathous tendency could have come from. He rightly said that prognathism could not have been due to admixture of Saxons with the descendants of Celts of the round barrow type, seeing that these broad-headed Celtic people were almost 9