Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/612

592 the Italian Piedmontese, or between the French Savoyards and Tyrolese.

From what has been said, it will appear that these Alpine populations in purity exceed any known tribes of central Asia in the breadth of their heads. Yet within three hundred miles, as the crow flies, in the island of Corsica, are communes with an average cephalic index of 73. These mountaineers of inland Corsica are thus as long-headed as any tribe of Australians, the wood Veddahs of Ceylon, or any African negroes of which we have extended observations. A little way farther to the north there are other populations in Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia which are almost as widely different from the Alpine peoples in the proportions of the head as are the Corsicans. An example of extreme individual variation downward is shown in our illustrated Teutonic type, which has a lower index than any recorded for the longest-headed primitive races known. Nor is this all. Pass to northern Scandinavia, and we find among the Lapps again, one of the broadest-headed peoples of the earth, of a type shown in our series of portraits.

So remarkably sudden are these transitions that one is tempted at first to regard them as the result of chance. Further examination is needed to show that it must be due to law. Proof of this is offered by the map itself; for it indicates a uniform gradation of head form from several specific centers of distribution outward. Consider Italy, for example, where over three hundred thousand individuals, from every little hamlet, have been measured in detail. The transition from north to south is perfectly consistent. The people of the extreme south are like the Tunisian shown in our portrait; while at the knee of Italy, halfway up, the mean type in our series of illustrations stands between the two geographical extremes in its proper place. So it is all over the continent. Each detailed research is a check on its neighbor. There is no escape from the conclusion that we have to do with law.

Two distinct races of man, measured by the head form alone, are to be found within the confines of this little continent. One occupies the heart of western Europe as an outpost of the great racial type which covers all Asia and most of eastern Europe as well. The other, to which we as Anglo-Saxons owe allegiance, seems to hang upon the outskirts of Europe, intrenched in purity in the islands and peninsulas alone. Northern Africa, as we have already observed, is to be classed with these. Furthermore, this long-headed type appears to be aggregated about two distinct centers of distribution—in the north and south respectively. In the next paper we shall show that these two centers of long-headedness are again divided from one another in respect of both color of hair and eyes and stature. From the final combination