Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/40

Rh the clearest detailed illustration of the expression of this racial peculiarity is offered by the people of Brittany. Many years ago observers began to note the contrasts in the Armorican Peninsula between the Bretons and the other French peasantry; and especially the local differences between the people of the interior and those fringing the seacoast. The regularity of the phenomenon is made manifest by the preceding map. This is constructed from observations on all the youth who came of age during a period of ten years from 1850-'59. There can be no doubt of the facts in the case. It has been tested in every way. Other measurements, made twenty years later, are precisely parallel in their results, as we have already seen in Finisterre.

The average stature of the whole peninsula is low, being only about five feet and five inches; yet in this "tache noire" it descends more than a full inch below this. This appreciable difference is not wholly due to environment, although the facts cited for Finisterre show that it is of some effect. The whole peninsula is rocky and barren. The only advantage that the people on the coast enjoy is the support of the fisheries. This is no insignificant factor, to be sure. Yet we have direct proof beyond this that race is here in evidence; this is afforded by other physical differences between the population of the coast and that of the interior. The people of the littoral are lighter in hair and eyes, and appreciably longer-headed; in other words, they show traces of Teutonic intermixture. In ancient times this whole coast was known as the "litus Saxonicum," so fiercely was it ravaged by these northern barbarians. Then, again, in the fifth century, immigrants from Britain, who in fact bestowed the name of Brittany upon the country, came over in hordes, dispossessed in England by the same Teutonic invaders. They were probably Teutonic also; for the invaders of Britain came so fast that they literally crowded themselves out of the little island. The result has been to infuse a new racial element into all the border populations in Brittany, while the original physical traits remain in undisturbed possession of the interior. The Normans to the northeast are, on the other hand, quite purely Teutonic, especially marked in their height. In this case environment and race have joined hands in the final result, but the latter seems to have been the senior partner in the affair.

One more detailed illustration of the persistence of stature as a racial trait may be found in the people of the Austrian Tyrol, familiarized to us in the last paper. Unfortunately, our