Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/211

Rh Scotland combines the isolation of the highlands with a great extent of seacoast. The result has been that in including the population of both areas in a single curve we find evidence of impurity in the great variability of stature.

By the second geographical method which we have described, we constitute our racial types as the archæologist, from a mass of broken fragments of pottery, restores the designs upon his shattered and incomplete vases. Upon a bit of clay he discovers tracings of a portion of a conventionalized human figure. A full third—let us say the head of Thoth or some other Egyptian deity—is missing. The figure is incomplete to this extent. Near by is found upon another fragment a representation of the head and half the body of another figure. In this case it is the legs alone which lack. This originally formed no part of the same vase with the first bit. It is perhaps of entirely different size and color. Nevertheless, finding that the portions of the design upon the two fragments bear marks of identity in motive or design, data for the complete restoration of the figure of the god are at hand. It matters not that from the fragments in his possession the archæologist can reconstruct no single perfect form. The pieces of clay will in no wise fit together. The designs, notwithstanding, so complement one another that his mind is set at rest. The affinity of the two portions is almost as clearly defined as the disposition of certain chemical elements to combine in fixed proportions; for primitive religion or ornament is not tolerant of variation.

We copy the procedure of the archæologist precisely. In one population color of hair and stature gravitate toward certain definite combinations. Not far away, perhaps in another thousand men drawn from the same locality, the same stature is found to manifest an affinity for certain types of head form. It may require scores of observations to detect the tendency, so slight has it become. In still another thousand men perhaps a third combination is revealed. These all, however, overlap at the edges. Granted that an assumption is necessary. It is allowed to the archæologist. Our conclusions are more certain than his, even as the laws of physical combination are more immutable than those of mental association. For it was merely mental conservatism which kept the primitive designer of the vase from varying his patterns. Here we have unchanging physical facts upon which to rely. Of course, we should be glad to find all our physical traits definitely associated in completeness in the same thousand recruits, were it not denied to us. The archæologist would likewise rejoice at the discovery of a single perfect design upon a single vase. Both of us lack entities; we must be contented with affinities instead.