Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/753

Rh is tempered only in those districts like Austria, where we know both from language and history that the Teutonic influencehas been strong. Other physical traits will corroborate this deduction shortly. Yet these Austrian Germans are to-day only distantly related to the blond Scandinavian Germans along the Baltic. They resemble the Bavarians and Swabians, who are, as we know, a cross between the blond Teutonic race and a thick-set, broad-headed Alpine one. Leaving aside for the moment the long-headed strip on the Black Sea, shown by our map, we can not resist the final inference that all this part of Europe, now inhabited by the southern Slavs, is fundamentally Alpine in racial type, although eroded in places by Teutonic influences from the north, and disturbed by the volcanic irruption of the Finnic Magyars and the Turkish Bulgarians.

The word Russian is undoubtedly derived from a root meaning-red. Our adjective rufous, and the name Ruthenian, applied to the inhabitants of Galicia, bear the same signification. The name is aptly applied, for the Russians, wherever found, are characterized by a distinct tendency toward what we would term a reddish blondness. Janczuk, in the government of Minsk, in White Russia, found almost half his peasants to have hair of this shade. It is not a real red, however. It might be called either a light chestnut, a dark flaxen, or an auburn tint. This shade of hair, combined with what Talko-Hryncewicz terms a "beer-colored" eye, is the center from which variation up or down occurs. This range of variation is quite considerable, and seems to conform to the general law for all Europe, to which we have already called attention. Brunetteness increases regularly from north to south. In Russia the population also manifests a distinct tendency toward darker hair and eyes from west to east. The Baltic Sea is the center of distribution for blondness, here as in Germany. The relations are well illustrated by the following table; statistics offer merely a scientific confirmation of the facts of common observation:

These figures show that the Letto-Lithuanians are the lightest people in the group. They are characterized most frequently by a blue eye, and light hair which rivals the Swedes and Norwegians in