Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/318

306 region. Wherever they left the country untouched, the population approaches the Alpine type, being darker, broader-headed, and shorter in stature. This indicates that the tribes, such as the Caletes (the city of Caux), the Lexovii (Lisieux), and the Baiocasses (Bayeux) in Cæsar's time were probably of this latter type; in other words, that the district was Alpine in population until the Normans came with Rollo in the tenth century. The Romans appear to have allowed the Saxons to settle at places along the seacoast, but they had never penetrated deeply into the interior.

The correspondence between the map of Norman place names and that of cephalic index is sufficiently close to attest to the value of each. One of the common features of the Teutonic village names is "ville," from "weiler," meaning an abode, and not from "villa," of Romance origin. This suffix appears, for example,



in Haconville, or in a corrupted form in Hardivilliers. Another common ending of place names is bœuf, as in Marbœuf. Dr. Collignon has traced out a considerable number of such place names of Norman origin, all of which point to the Cotentin—that distinct peninsula which juts out into the English Channel—as a center of Norman dispersion. Certain it is that Cherbourg, at its extremity, shows the Norman element at its maximum purity. Probably this was a favorite base of supplies, protected by its isolation and in close proximity to the island of Jersey, which the Normans also held. The Saxon colony near Caen was a factor also which determined this location. The extension of the Normans to the west seems to have been stopped by the human dike set up by the English and Saxons about Dinan, and by "Norman Switzerland," the hilly region just east of it. Follow the