Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/448

434 France. It is befitting to do so; for Cæsar informs us that the Belgæ in his time controlled the whole region. Roman Gaul, properly speaking, extended only as far north as the Seine and the Marne. In Cæsar's time the frontier of Belgium—the land of the Belgæ—lay near Paris. Has its recession to the north produced any appreciable change upon the people? Certainly not in any physical sense, as we shall attempt to point out.

The northern third of France and half of Belgium are to-day more Teutonic than the south of Germany. This is clearly attested by the maps which show the distribution of each of the physical characteristics of race. It should not occasion surprise when we remember the incessant downpour of Teutonic tribes during the whole historic period. It was a constant procession, of Goths—from all points of the compass—of Franks, Burgundians, and others. France was entirely overrun by the Franks, with the exception of Brittany, by the middle of the sixth century. All through the middle ages this part of Europe was not only ethnically Teutonic: it was German in language and customs as well. The very name of the country is Teutonic. It has the same origin as Franconia in southern Germany. In 812 the Council of Tours, away down south, ordained that every bishop should preach both in the Romance and the Teutonic languages. The Franks preserved their German speech four hundred years after the conquest. Charlemagne was a German; his courtiers were all Germans; he lived and governed from outside the limits of modern France. The Abbé Sieyès uttered an ethnological truism when, in the course of the French Revolution, he cried out against the French aristocracy: "Let us send them back to their German marshes whence they came!" Even to-day the current of migration between France and Germany sets strongly to the south, as it has ever done in virtue of economic laws deeper than national prejudice or hostile legislation.

The movement of population racially has been strongly influenced by the geography of the country. Were it not for the peculiar conformation of this part of Europe, there would be no geographical excuse for the existence of Belgium as a separate