Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/538

520 racial habit of allowing a certain freedom and independence to women has proved stronger in practice than the law of Islam; the intrusive Semite has not been able to inoculate with his ideas the Hamitic North African. Nor in "Aryan" Persia, again, has the prohibition against wine been so successful as elsewhere; while the native artistic and pictorial spirit of the Persian race has made a dead letter of the restriction against fashioning an image of anything that is in heaven above, or in earth beneath, or in the waters that are under the earth. Race, in short, has proved stronger than religion. For the Persians are Shiahs, not orthodox Sunnis; they have transformed the materialistic tenets of Islam into a mysticism not far removed from that of India or the Buddhists. Who could mistake Omar Khayyam for a mere Mohammedan?

Very similar ethnical diversities of faith may also be noticed in our own islands. The Anglican church, as a rule, has firmly established itself in the more Teutonic and southeastern half of Britain alone. The Gaelic Celts, both in Ireland and the Scotch Highlands, have remained Roman Catholic; the Cymric Celts, both in Wales and Cornwall, have adopted Wesleyanism or some emotional form of Protestant nonconformity. Even in England proper it will be found that the Establishment flourishes best in the Teutonic southeast, while dissent is rife in the half-Celtic north, in the Yorkshire dales, in Lancashire, and in the west country. I may add, side by side with these facts, that poets, musicians, and painters spring most frequently in Britain from the Celtic or semi-Celtic north and west, while they are rarer in the Teutonic or Teutonized south and east. Vocalists, in particular, are very frequently Welsh. Even in London, that vast congeries of mingled races, it is not without reason that nonconformity is led by Cambrians like the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, and that song is dispensed for us by Mr. Hirwen Jones and Mr. Ben Davies.

Canon Isaac Taylor has pointed out a still more curious crossdivision of Europe as a whole, dependent upon underlying racial features. Two main types of skull are generally distinguished throughout the whole historic and prehistoric period—there are the dolichocephalic or long-headed, and the brachycephalic or shortheaded people. "The dolichocephalic Teutonic race," says the learned canon frankly, "is Protestant; the brachycephalic Celto-Slavic race is either Roman Catholic or Greek orthodox. . . . The Teutonic peoples are averse to sacerdotalism, and have shaken off priestly guidance and developed individualism. Protestantism was a revolt against a religion imposed by the South upon the North, but which had never been congenial to the Northern mind. The German princes, who were of purer Teutonic blood than their