Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/362

348 characters. Typical specimens have tall and massive frames, fair complexions, blue eyes, and yellow or reddish hair—that is to say, they are pronounced blonds. Their skulls are long, in the sense that the breadth is usually less, often much less, than four fifths of the length, and they are usually tolerably high. But in this last respect they vary. Men of this blond, long-headed race abound from eastern Prussia to northern Belgium; they are met with in northern France and are common in some parts of our own islands. The people of Teutonic speech, Goths, Saxons, Alemanni, and Franks, who poured forth out of the regions bordering the North Sea and the Baltic, to the destruction of the Roman Empire, were men of this race; and the accounts of the ancient historians of the incursions of the Gauls into Italy and Greece, between the fifth and the second centuries leave little doubt that their hordes were largely, if not wholly, composed of similar men. The contents of numerous interments in southern Scandinavia prove that, as far back as archæology takes us into the so-called Neolithic age, the great majority of the inhabitants had the same stature and cranial peculiarities as at present, though their bony fabric bears marks of somewhat greater ruggedness and savagery. There is no evidence that the country was occupied by men before the advent of these tall, blond long-heads. But there is proof of the presence, along with the latter, of a small percentage of people with broad skulls—skulls, that is, the breadth of which is more, often very much more, than four fifths of the length.

At the present day, in whatever direction we travel inland from the continental area occupied by the blond long-heads, whether southwest, into central France; south, through the Walloon provinces of Belgium into eastern France; into Switzerland, south Germany, and the Tyrol; or southeast, into Poland and Russia; or north, into Finland and Lapland, broad-heads make their appearance, in force, among the long-heads. And, eventually, we find ourselves among people who are as regularly broad-headed as the Swedes and North Germans are long-headed. As a general rule, in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and south Germany, the increase in the proportion of broad skulls is accompanied by the appearance of a larger and larger proportion of men of brunet complexion and of a lower stature; until, in central France and thence eastward, through the Cevennes and the Alps of Dauphiny, Savoy, and Piedmont, to the western plains of north Italy, the tall blond long-heads practically disappear, and are replaced by