Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/618

598 here between the head form in city and country, and between the upper and lower classes in the larger towns. Several explanations for this were possible. The direct influence of urban life might conceivably have brought it about, acting through superior education, habits of life, and the like. There was no psychological basis for this assumption. Another tenable hypothesis was that in these cities, situated, as we have endeavored to show, in a land where two racial types of population were existing side by side, the city for some reason exerted superior powers of attraction upon the long-headed race. If this were true, then, by a combined process of social and racial selection, Carlsruhe, Freiburg, Mannheim, and the other towns would be continually drawing unto themselves that tall and blond Teutonic type of population which, as history teaches us, has dominated social and political affairs in Europe for centuries. This suggested itself as the probable solution of the question; and investigations all over Europe during the last five years have been directed to the further analysis of the matter. This was not an entirely new discovery even for Germany; the same fact had been previously noted in Würtemberg, that the peasantry were noticeably rounder-headed than the upper classes, Yet Amnion undoubtedly first gave detailed proof of its existence, basing it upon a great number of physical measurements; and he undoubtedly first recognized its profound significance for the future. To him belongs the honor of the discovery of the so-called "Amnion's law," that the Teutonic race betrays almost everywhere a marked penchant for city life. This is all the more surprising as Tacitus tells us that the ancient Germans, unlike the Italians, were strongly imbued with a hatred of communal existence. We have no time to give in detail all the evidence which has been accumulated in favor of its validity. The fact of greater frequency of the long-headed type in town populations, as compared with rural districts, has been established by Lapouge in a great number of investigations all through central and southern France and in Brittany. Collignon, foremost authority upon the physical anthropology of France, gives in his adherence to it as a general rule, finding it applicable to Bordeaux and nearly all the cities of the southwest. It seems to hold true in Vienna, which with its suburbs forms a little islet of Teutonic long-headedness in Austria. In northern Italy the long-headedness is quite universally more prevalent in all