Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/178

164 has been crowding its predecessor to the wall in every direction. This has been proved beyond all possible doubt. In the nooks and corners, the swamps and hills, where the railroad and the newspaper are less important factors in everyday life, there we find a more primitive stratum of language. Is it not justifiable for us, from the observed parallel between speech and brunetteness, to assume also that of the two the darkest type in the British Isles is the older? Such is our argument. One detail of our map confirms us in this opinion. Notice the strongly marked island of brunetteness just north of London. Two counties, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, are as dark as Wales, and others north of them are nearly as unique. All investigation goes to show that this brunette outcrop is a reality. It is entirely severed from the main center of dark eyes and hair in the west by an intermediate zone as light as Sussex, Essex or Hampshire (Hants). The explanation is simple. We have already shown that the south Saxons entered England by the back door. They spread inland from the southern coast, prevented from following up the Thames by the presence of London. On the other side the same invaders pushed south from the Wash and the Humber. These two currents joined along the light intrusive zone. Our dark spot is the eddy of native traits, persistent because less overrun by the blond Teutons. The fens on the north, London on the south with dense forests in early times, left this population relatively at peace. This, history teaches us. Natural science corroborates it strikingly. In a later article, considering purely social phenomena, we shall show that peculiarities in suicide, land tenure, habits of the people, and other details of these counties are likewise the concomitants of this same relative isolation. The fact is all the more striking because the district lies so close to the largest city of Europe.

This variation of brunetteness in Britain is not a modern phenomenon. The contrast between northeast and southwest, while of course largely a result of the Teutonic invasions of historic times, should not be entirely ascribed to them. They have in all likelihood merely accentuated a condition already existing. This we assume from the testimony of Latin writers. In fact, Tacitus' statements, the mainstay of the hypothesis of an Iberian substratum of population in Britain, prove that long before the advent of the Saxons several distinct physical types coexisted in Roman Britain. One of these, he tells us in the eleventh chapter of his Agricola, was the Caledonian, "red-haired and tall"; the other, that of the Silures in southern Wales, with "dark complexion and curly hair." He also