Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/328

312 comparing types in the British Isles, we saw that everything tended to show that the brunette populations of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland constituted the most primitive stratum of population in Britain.

As to stature, a trait in which the Teuton and the Iberian differ markedly from one another to-day, we have abundant evidence that this neolithic population was more akin to the medium-statured French than to the relatively gigantic Germans and Scandinavians. The men of this epoch were not, to be sure, as diminutive as the modern south Italians or the Spaniards; they seem rather to approximate the medium height of the inhabitants of northern Africa. These Berbers and their fellows, in fact, shading off as they do into the negro race south of the Sahara, we must regard as having least departed from the aboriginal European type. And in Europe proper the brunette long-headed Mediterranean race is but slightly aberrant from it. It may have become stunted by too protracted civilization, it may have changed somewhat in facial proportions, but on the whole it has remained true to its ancestral image.

III. It is highly probable that the Teutonic race of northern Europe is merely a variety of this primitive long-headed type of the stone age, both its distinctive blondness and its remarkable stature having been acquired in the relative isolation of Scandinavia through the modifying influences of environment and of natural selection.

This theory of a relationship between the two long-headed races of Europe is not entirely novel. Canon Taylor hints it under his breath as a remote possibility. We affirm it as the best working hypothesis possible in the light of recent investigations. It will be seen at once that this theorem rests upon the assumption that the head form is a decidedly more permanent racial characteristic than pigmentation. In so doing it relegates to a secondary position the color of the hair and eyes, which so eminent an anthropologist as Huxley has made the basis of his whole scheme of classification of European peoples. Dr. Brinton, and after him Keane, have likewise relied upon these traits in tracing their Aryan race to a lair in northern Africa. Nevertheless, we do not hesitate to affirm that the research of the last ten years has turned the scales in favor of the cranium, if properly studied, as the most reliable test of race. We know that brunetteness varies with age in the same individual—that is one proof of its impermanence. In a preceding article we devoted some attention to proving also that there is a factor of the environment in mountainous or infertile regions which operates to increase the proportion of blond traits among men. We did not seek