Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/646

630 the primitive population of the Pyrenees; and the latter have adopted the Basque language and customs: for they were penned in by them all along the base of the mountains and had no other option. This community of language and customs could not fail to encourage intermarriage; to the final end that to-day in the mountains the Basque is considerably crossed, as our map shows. In the plains, on the other hand, the line of demarcation of blood is as sharp as that of speech. Purity of type on this side was made possible by the political independence which Basse-Navarre has always enjoyed.

We have still to inquire as to the physical origin of this curious people. We have traced them back to Spain. Whence did they come into this country in the first place? Are they of African descent, following Broca's theory, or are they offshoots from Mongolian stock as Pruner Bey would have it? Or must we class them with the lost tribes of Israel? We already know the physical type of the prehistoric Cro-Magnon race. Let us compare it with our Vascons and test the theory of descent from it. The Basque head is disharmonic—that is, it is broad, while the face is extraordinarily narrow. This is in contravention of the general law that the face and the head usually participate alike in the relative proportions of breadth and length. Thus, as our portraits have shown, the broad-headed Alpine stock in Béarn has a round, short face; while the dolichocephalic population of the Pyrenees, lying behind the Basque, has a correspondingly long, oval visage. The Cro-Magnon race offers the only other example of a widespread disharmonic head in Europe. Are our Basques derived from this pure ethnic source? Curiously enough, these two cases of disharmonism so near to one another cross at right angles. In the Basque the head is broad and the face narrow; in the Cro-Magnon it is the head which is narrow while the face is broad. In view of this flat contradiction, the hypothesis of the Basque as a direct and pure descendant of the most primitive prehistoric population of Europe becomes completely untenable. Thus we dispose of one possible source for this people. We have already rejected those based upon intermixture. The broad head of our Basque with its narrow face is explained by De Aranzadi, himself a Basque, by the supposition of an admixture of Lapp blood to give the broad head with Iberian or Berber blood for the narrow face. Modern research is, however, inimical to such hasty assumptions of migrations across continents and over seas: for the inertia of simple societies is immense. Causes of variation nearer at home are regarded as more probable and potent, and there is none more powerful than social selection.

The difficulty of placing the Basque is solved by Dr. Collignon in a novel and yet simple way which has won favor already