Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/700

682 races, ancient and modern, which, have been pursued by this distinguished investigator for nearly half a century.

M, de Quatrefages proceeds to show the evidences of the former extension of the Finnish race through the countries now occupied by the Slavonic and Teutonic populations. Of one particular tribe his opinion will astonish those ethnologists who have held up this peculiar sept [sic] as the most primitive and typical remnant of the Aryan race. The Lithuanians, he finds, are in the main of Uralian origin. "Though they speak an Aryan idiom, they are nevertheless," he affirms, "not Aryan in blood. They are the brothers of the Esthonians, and if these are Finnish, as all the world agrees, the others are Finnish likewise."

Among the Finns he finds two distinct types. That which comprises the great majority of the people has a decidedly Mongol cast. The other inclines to the Aryan type. He has no doubt that among the so-called Finns and their congeners there has been a strong infusion of Aryan blood; and this admixture will sufficiently explain the traces of the Aryan language which many scholars, including Diefenbach, Weske, Cuno, and, lately. Canon Taylor, have pointed out in the Uralian dialects. The people of the proper Finnish type are of medium stature, sturdy and muscular, with large and square heads, long, broad, and square faces, the lower jaw strongly developed, the nose small and rather wide, the mouth large, the complexion fair, deepening to olive gray; the eyes small, sometimes slightly oblique, the iris a grayish blue or bluish gray; the hair flaxen in hue, or sometimes of a reddish yellow, straight and silky. In character they are serious, manly, thoughtful, taciturn, slow in movement, both physically and mentally; very conservative, disposed to live at peace with the authorities; somewhat suspicious and vindictive; patient and resolute under suffering; not demonstrative, but kind and helpful to their neighbors; and at bottom thoroughly honest and faithful.

In all these traits, both physical and moral, we see clearly the basis of the Slavonic type and, to a large extent, of the Teutonic; though here apparently there has been some admixture of another primitive element, probably the Iberian. Over all is impressed, and more especially, as might be expected, among the higher classes, the influence of the Aryan conquerors, who, to use the striking expression applied by the poet Campbell to the Normans in England, have "high-mettled the blood" of the race. Under this influence the Uralo-Aryan nations of northern and central Europe, while still patient, conservative, and long-enduring, have become capable of united action, of strenuous effort, and of a resulting progress in thought and freedom which the Aryans themselves, in their primitive seats, have never been able to compass.