Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/331

Rh it has remained in relative purity ever since. From, the earliest remains of the lake dwellers; before iron was used; before many of the simpler arts of agriculture or domestication of animals were developed; man has in these Alps remained perfectly true to his ancestral type. We can add art after art to his culture, but we can not till very recent times detect any movement of population after the first occupation in a state of relative savagery by this broad-headed race. It is a surprising instance of persistence of ethnic types.

Let us trace the extension of this invasion of the Alpine race into Europe. Its limits were once much broader than they are to-day. Evidence accumulates to show that it spread widely at first, but that it was afterward obliged to recede from its first extravagant claims to possess all Europe. In our last article we saw that all along the southwest coast of Norway clear evidence of intermixture with this broad-headed type appears. The peasantry show a distinct tendency in this direction. In Denmark the same thing is true; the people are not as pure Teutons as in Hanover. We also know that this race invaded Britain for a time, but was exterminated or absorbed before reaching Ireland. A very peculiar colony of these Alpine invaders seems also to have so firmly intrenched itself in the Netherlands that its influence is apparent even to this day. As we have not described the population of this interesting country in any of our papers heretofore, it will repay us to consider it for a moment.

Attention was first directed to the Netherlands in 1876 through a remarkable paper by Virchow, in which he analyzed a series of skulls from Eriesland and from the islands of Urk and Marken in the Zuider Zee. In this he declared that the long-headed people there resident were not Teutons at all; but by reason of the peculiar low-vaulted formation of the cranium were to be regarded as far more ancient types. He asserted that here in these unattractive low-lands and islands was a last relic of the Neanderthal race of the early