Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/513

Rh, where the descendants of the Spanish settlers thrive in a climate very analogous to that of Spain. In the southern states of North America the whites can not flourish, and only just manage to survive. On the other hand, the descendants of the Negro slaves imported into Brazil, the West Indies and the southern states of North America thrive and multiply with extraordinary vigor; a fact doubtless due to their race having been evolved under similar conditions in equatorial Africa.

Even from the evidence already to hand there is high probability that intermarriage can do little to form a new race unless the parents on both sides are of races evolved in similar environments.

I have already pointed out that although the fair-haired race of upper Europe has age after age kept pouring over the Alps into Italy and the other southern peninsulas, and has constantly intermixed with the indigenous populations, it is only in the upper part of Italy that the blond race is able to hold its own. In Italy the xanthochrous race in ancient times, as to-day, had its maximum along the Alps, and gradually dwindled towards the south until the melanochrous race stood practically alone in the lower part of the peninsula. So too in the Balkan, whilst the fair-haired element was at its maximum along the Alps and the Danube, southwards the melanochrous becomes more and more completely dominant, as it practically is to-day in the lower part of the peninsula.

(b) In the Alpine regions there has been from Neolithic times a brachycephalic race, also found in central France and in the British Isles, whither it is supposed to have come in the Bronze age. It has been a fundamental article of faith with Sergi and others that this round-headed race came from Asia, the home of brachycephalism. It is Mongolian according to most, and spoke a non-Aryan language; but Sergi regards it as Aryan, thus reverting to the old doctrine, which made the Aryans come from central Asia, and he assumes that these invaders imposed their language both on the aborigines of Italy, such as the Ligurians, and on the blond race of northern Europe; but we shall soon see that this assumption has no base. Now, as these folk dwelt in the region where we find the Ligurians of historical times, others have argued that the Ligurians were a non-Aryan people from Asia. But it is impossible to find any hard-and-fast lines between the Alpine race and the peoples north and south of it in culture and sociology. For that reason, when treating of the people of the Alps in my "Early Age of Greece" I did not take any account of the difference in cranial measurements. In 1906, at the British Association, I maintained that this difference of skull type did not mean any racial difference, and on the analogy of the changes in the osteology of the Equidæ I urged that the roundness of the skulls was simply due