Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/455

Rh of the Paris-Bordeaux axis of fertility. At the northwest appears the lower edge of the broad-headedness of the area of Brittany; then succeeds a belt of long heads from Paris to Bordeaux, to the

south of which comes the main feature—a central strip of the Alpine type pushing its way to the extreme southwest, as we have said. The portrait herewith is a good example of the last-named round-headed type, which forms the bulk of the population. We are confronted by a racial distribution which appears to be utterly at variance with all the laws which elsewhere in France determine the ethnic character of its population.

One point is certain: either conditions have changed wonderfully since Strabo's time, or else the old geographer was far from being a discriminating anthropologist, when he described the people of Aquitaine as uniformly Iberians, both in race and in customs. A large element among them is as far removed from the Spaniards in race as it is possible in Europe to be. There is, as our map shows, a strip all along the Mediterranean which is Iberically narrow-headed and oval-faced, of a type illustrated in our portrait. Especially is this true in the department of Pyrenées-Orientales, shown on our map by the banded white area. This is the only part of France where the Catalan language is spoken to-day, as we took occasion to point out in our first article. This population in Roussillon is truly Iberian both in race and language; all the other peoples of Aquitaine differ from the Spaniards in both respects.