Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/315

Rh, save as it clings for dear life to the outskirts of the British Isles. Here again, we find an ethnic struggle in process, which has been going on for centuries, unsuspected by the statesmen who were building a nation upon these shifting sands of race. This struggle depends, as elsewhere in France, upon the topography of the country. The case is so peculiar, however, that it will repay us to consider it a little more in detail.

The anthropological fate of Brittany, this last of our three main areas of isolation, depends largely upon its peninsular form. Its frontage of seacoast and its many harbors have rendered it peculiarly liable to invasion from the sea; while at the same time it has been protected on the east by its remoteness from the economic and political centers and highways of France. This coincidence and not a greater purity of blood has preserved its Celtic speech. Since the foreigners have necessarily touched at separate points along its coast, concerted attack upon the language has been rendered impossible. This fact of invasion from the sea has divided its people not into the men of the mountain distinct from those of the plain—a differentiation of population, by the way, as old as the reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes. The contrast has arisen between the seacoast and the interior. The people of the inland villages contain a goodly proportion of the Alpine stock, although, as our maps show, it is more attenuated than in either Savoy or Auvergne. To the eye this Alpine lineage appears in a



roundness of the face, a concave nose in profile, and broad nostrils. Along the coast intermixture has narrowed the heads, lightened the complexion, and, perhaps more than all, increased the stature. For an example of these contrasts our maps will