Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/761

Rh limits of Slavdom, and found to underlie it throughout. Two explanations were suggested for this widespread phenomenon. Bogdanof and a few others asserted that civilization implied an increased broad-headedness, that a morphological change had taken place in the same people, while the majority of anthropologists found in it proof of an entire change of race since the earliest times. The first explanation, even granting that the brachycephalic races as a rule are endowed with a greater cranial capacity than the long-headed ones, could hardly be accorded a warm reception in any of the Anglo-Saxon countries like our own. To relegate long-headedness to an inferior cultural position would result not only in damning the entire Teutonic race, but that one also which produced the early Semitic, Greek, and Roman civilizations. No explanation for the recency of broad-headedness in the Slavic countries is, then, tenable for a moment, save that the brachycephalic contingent is a newcomer in the land.

Which of these two ethnic elements which have contended so long for mastery among the people of this part of Europe represents the primitive Slavic type? It is a delicate matter, by no means free from national prejudice. The Germans have always looked down upon their eastern neighbors, by reason of their backwardness in culture. Our ignoble word "slave" is a product of this disdain in Europe of the Slav. To find the primitive Slavic type, therefore, in that variety, which accords so completely with our pattern of the Teutonic race, is disheartening to the Germans as for the Slavs themselves; it runs counter to their distrust of modern aggressive Teutonism. Even science is not free to violate the provisions of the Triple Alliance with impunity.

The most generally accepted theory among anthropologists as to the physcalphysical [sic] relationship of the Slavs is that they were always, as the majority of them are to-day, of the same stock as the broad-headed Alpine (Celtic) race. This latter occupies, as we have seen, all the central part of western Europe. It predominates among the north Italians, the French in Auvergne and Savoy, and the Swiss. It prevails in the Tyrol and all across southern Germany, in Alsace-Lorraine, Würtemberg, and Bavaria. The French anthropologists, especially Topinard, have emphasized the direct similarity in head form which exists between all these people and the Slavs. The name Celto-Slavic has been applied to this broad-headed race by virtue of this fact. It was a logical deduction from the first discovery of broad-headedness among the Slavs by A. Retzius, von Baer, and Weisbach. The main objection to it came from the philologists, who found the Slavic