Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/363

Rh short brunet broad-heads. The ordinary Savoyard may be described in terms the converse of those which apply to. the ordinary Swede. He is short, swarthy, dark-eyed, dark-haired, and his skull is very broad. Between the two extreme types, the one seated on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic, and the other on those of the Mediterranean, there are all sorts of intermediate forms, in which breadth of skull may be found in tall and in short blond men, and in tall brunet men.

There is much reason to believe that the brunet broad-heads, now met with in central France and in the west central European highlands, have inhabited the same region, not only throughout the historical period, but long before it commenced; and it is probable that their area of occupation was formerly more extensive. For, if we leave aside the comparatively late incursions of the Asiatic races, the center of eruption of the invaders of the southern moiety of Europe has been situated in the north and west. In the case of the Teutonic inroads upon the empire of Rome, it undoubtedly lay in the area now occupied by the blond long-heads; and, in that of the antecedent Gaulish invasions, the physical characters ascribed to the leading tribes point to the same conclusion. Whatever the causes which led to the breaking out of bounds of the blond long-heads, in mass, at particular epochs, the natural increase in numbers of a vigorous and fertile race must always have impelled them to press upon their neighbors, and thereby afford abundant occasions for intermixture. If, at any given prehistoric time, we suppose the lowlands verging on the Baltic and the North Sea to have been inhabited by pure blond long-heads, while the central highlands were occupied by pure brunet short-heads the two would certainly meet and intermix in course of time, in spite of the vast belt of dense forest which extended, almost uninterruptedly, from the Carpathians to the Ardennes; and the result would be such an irregular gradation of the one type into the other as we do, in fact, meet with.

On the southeast, east, and northeast, throughout what was once the kingdom of Poland, and in Finland, the preponderance of broad-heads goes along with a wide prevalence of blond complexion and of good stature. In the extreme north, on the other hand, marked broad-headedness is combined with low stature, swarthiness, and more or less strongly Mongolian features, in the