Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/310

298 birth rate long resisted the depressing influences of civilization. For years it has been converted into a veritable foundling asylum for the city of Paris. Its mothers have cared for innumerable waifs besides their own offspring. This isolated people is strongly Alpine, as our portraits show, the boy on the right being a peculiarly good type; the other one has a strain of Teutonic narrow-headedness from all appearances. Beyond a doubt here is another little spot in which the Alpine race has been able to persist by reason of isolation alone.

The law which holds true for most of France, then, is that the Alpine stock is confined to the areas of isolation and economic unattractiveness. A patent exception to this appears in Burgundy—the fertile plains of the Saone, lying south of Dijon. A strongly marked area of broad-headedness cuts straight across the Saone Valley at this point. A most desirable country is strongly held by a broad-headed stock, although it is very close to the Teutonic immigration route up along the Rhine. Here we have a striking example of the reversion of a people to its early type after a complete military conquest. It serves as an apt illustration of the impotency of a conquering tribe to exterminate the original population. The Burgundians, as we know, belonged to a blond and tall race of Teutonic lineage, who came to the country from the north in considerable numbers in the fifth century. The Romans welcomed them in Gaul, forcing the people to grant them one half of their houses, two thirds of their cultivated land, and a third of their slaves. For about a thousand years this district of Burgundy took its rule more or less from the Teutonic invaders: and yet to-day it has completely reverted to its primitive type of population. It is even more French than the Auvergnats themselves. The common people have virtually exterminated every trace of their conquerors. Even their great height (shown on our stature map), for which the Burgundians have long been celebrated, is probably more to be ascribed to the material prosperity of the district than to a Teutonic strain. One factor contributing to the result we observe is that the fertile country of the Saone Valley is open to constant immigration from Switzerland and the surrounding mountains. The Rhine has drawn off the Teutons in another direction, and political hatreds have discouraged immigration from the north-east. The result has been that the Alpine type has been strongly