Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/790

768 brunette traits are upward of a third more frequent than among the Flemish in northern Belgium. This is especially marked by the prevalence of dark hair in the hilly country south of Brussels. The British Isles offer another example of local differences in this respect which can not be ascribed to environment. Wales and Ireland, Cornwall and part of Scotland are appreciably brunette, as compared with other regions near by. The contrast between Normandy and Brittany in France is of even greater value to us in this connection. Dark hair is more than twice as common in the Breton cantons as it is along the English Channel in Normandy. These differences can not be due to the Gulf Stream mildness of the western climate or to the physical environment in any other way. If we may judge from our scanty data for Spain, another racial break occurs here as well, which seems to justify the statement that "beyond the Pyrenees begins Africa." In the other direction, among the Hungarians, we begin to scent an Asiatic influence in the dark population of the southeast of Europe.

Perhaps the most conspicuous example of the racial fixity of this trait of pigmentation is offered by the Jews. They have preserved their Semitic brunetteness through all adversities. Socially ostracized and isolated, they have kept this coloration despite all migrations and changes of climate. In Germany to-day forty-two per cent of them are pure brunettes in a population containing only fourteen per cent of the dark type on the average. They are thus darker by thirty per cent than their Gentile neighbors. As one goes south this difference tends to disappear. In Austria they are less than ten per cent darker than the general population; and finally in the extreme south they are even lighter than the populations about them. This is especially true of the red-haired type common in the East. To discover such differences requires minute examination. The reward has been to prove that pigmentation in spite of climate is indeed a fixed racial characteristic among the people of Europe. We are therefore encouraged to hope that great racial groups of population may still yield us evidence of their relationship or lack of it in this respect, as well as in the head form.

It will be necessary, before considering this matter further, for us to turn aside for a moment to study the population of central Europe a little more in detail than we have thus far been able to do. We shall attempt to prove a point of great significance. The broad-headed type not only forms the bulk of the present population of the Alpine highlands. This was established in the preceding paper. We have now to prove that it at the same time is clearly the oldest or most primitive element among the inhabitants of this region; that it lies so near the soil that the racial