Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/358

342 series. They are about like the northern French and southern Germans. More important still, they seem to be generally very closely akin in head form to the people among whom they reside. Thus, in Russia and Poland scarcely an appreciable difference exists in this respect between Jews and Christians. The same is true in Turin, while in the direction of Asia our Jews are as bullet-headed as even the most typical Armenians and Caucasians round about them.

This surprising similarity of head form between the Jews of North and South Europe bears hard upon the long-accepted theory that the Sephardim is dolichocephalic, thereby remaining true to the original Semitic type borne to-day by the Arabs. It has quite universally been accepted that the two branches of the Jews differed most materially in head form. From the facial dissimilarity of the two a correlative difference in head form was a gratuitous inference. Dr. Beddoe observes that in Turkey the Spagnuoli "seemed" to him to be more dolichocephalic. A few years later Barnard Davis (1867) "suspected" a diversity, but had only three Italian skulls to judge from, so that his testimony counts for little. Then Weisbach (1877) referred to the "exquisitely" long heads of the Spagnuoli, but his data show a different result. Ikof, with his small series of crania from Constantinople, is the only observer who got a result which accords in any degree with what we know of the head form of the modern Semitic peoples. On the other hand, Glück in Bosnia and Livi in Italy find no other sign of long-headedness than a slight drop in index of a point or two. Jacobs, in England, whose methods, as Topinard has observed, are radically defective, gives no averages for his Sephardim, but they appear to include about eleven per cent less pure long-headed types than even their Ashkenazim brethren in London. This, it will be noted, is the exact opposite of what might normally be expected. This tedious summary forces us inevitably to the conclusion that, while a long-headed type of Sephardim Jews may exist, the law is very far from being satisfactorily established.

Thus, from a study of our primary characteristic—the proportions of the head—we find our modern Jews endowed with a relatively much broader head than that of the average Englishman, for example: while the best living representative of the Semitic race, the Arab, has a head which is even longer and narrower than onr own type. It is, in short, one of the longest known, being in every way distinctly African. The only modern Jews who even approach this type would seem to be those who actually reside today in Africa, as in the case of our two portrait types from that region. Two possible explanations are open to us: either the great