Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/644

628 broader-headed than even the neighboring peasantry of Beam, and of course even more so than the long-headed Spanish population across the Pyrenees. Turning back to our map on page 620, this will appear. Of course, the Basques are not more extreme in this respect than the pure Alpine type; we mean that they rise in cephalic index above their immediate and adulterated Alpine neighbors in Béarn. This implies, of course, that they are at the same time far broader-headed than the Spanish Basques over the mountains. Thus we dispose at once of the explanation offered both by Canon Taylor and De Quatrefages for the broad-headedness of the French over the Spanish Basque. Taylor accounted for this marked difference between the people of the two opposite slopes of the Pyrenees on the supposition that in invading Béarn from Spain the Basques intermarried with the broad-headed Alpine stock there prevailing, and so deviated from their parent type. This fact that we have mentioned, that in France in their greatest purity the Basques are broader-headed than the Béarnais about them, proves beyond question that they are brachycephalic by birth and not by intermixture with their French neighbors. In Spain, on the other hand, the facial Basque, if we may use the term, is slightly broader-headed than his purely Spanish neighbor. Surrounded thus on all sides by people with longer and narrower heads, we are forced to the conclusion that this people is by nature of a broad headed race. An important corollary is that the pure Basque is to-day found in France and not in Spain, although they both speak the same language. This exactly reverses Taylor's theory. It is the Spanish Basque which is a cross-type—in other words, narrower-headed by four units than the French Basque because of intermixture with the dolichocephalic Spaniards. Those who are found here in Spain are probably stragglers; they have merged their physical identity in that of their Spanish neighbors. Their political autonomy on this south side of the mountains being less marked, the power of ethnic resistance vanished quickly as well.

Having disposed of the explanation of origin by intermixture, the only hypothesis tenable is that these Basques are immigrants that they are an intrusive people. Dr. Collignon's explanation—is so simple and agrees so well both with history and with anthropological facts that we give it as nearly as possible in his own words: During the Roman imperial rule a number of petty Iberian tribes, by virtue of the same tenacity which enables their descendants to enjoy political autonomy to this day, had preserved a similar independence south of the Pyrenees. Such were the Vardules, Caristes, Autrigons, and the Vascons (Basque—by no means physically identical with the Gascons, although derived from the same root word). These last occupied the upper