Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/756

732 is an indisputably proved fact. The presence of this horde of Jews, in Poland often outnumbering the natives, especially in the towns, is largely accountable for the short stature shown by our map. This does not exonerate the Poles by any means from the charge of relative diminutiveness. The degree in which they are surpassed by their Slavic neighbors is shown by our map on the next page. Comparisons with Russia are facilitated by the uniformity of tints. Yet even here in Austria-Hungary the shortness of the Poles and Ruthenians, which together form the population of Galicia, may be partly attributable to the large contingent of Jews.

The clearest example of stature as an unmitigated ethnic trait, hereditary and persistent, is shown in the eastern half of Austria-Hungary, on our second map. Notice the lightness of shading among all the Germans (Deutsche) in Austria, in the Tyrol, and in the northwestern corner of Bohemia (Böhmen). These are just the districts where Teutonic infiltration from the north has been historically proved since early times. We have already mentioned it in our study of the head form. The German-speaking Austrians, then, are by nature, and not by acquisition, an inch or two taller than many of the Slavic peoples subject to their political domination. It is the same phenomenon already so familiar to us in the case of the relatively gigantic Burgundian peasantry in France to-day; in the tallness of the people of Lombardy; and, above all, in the Teutonized eastern half of the British Isles. This latter example comes directly home to us, because we in America owe a large measure of our surpassingstature to the same ethnic cause. Never has a physical trait shown so surprising a persistency as in the height of these Teutonic peoples.

Just here a difficulty confronts us—one which no anthropologist has satisfactorily explained. Our second map shows a very tall population among the southern Slavs, the Slovenes, Serbo-Croatians, and Bosnians, contrasted with the short Poles, Ruthenians, and Slovaks in the northeast. This can not historically be traced to a Teutonic ancestry. Anthropologically it is even less probable, because these southern Slavs are all very dark in hair and eye, being in this respect as in head form the polar extreme from the Teutons of the north. A distinct subcenter of giantism, inexplicable but established beyond all doubt, exists just east of the Adriatic Sea. Its influence radiates through the Slovenes over into northeastern Italy. We find indication of it in the Rhætian parts of Switzerland. Deniker, in his recent classification of the anthropological types of Europe, carries it even further, under the definite name of the Adriatic or Dinaric race. Can it be denied that the tallness of