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 assumption that in any one part of Europe a people of pure descent or of a pure racial type is found, and careful inquiry has failed completely to reveal any inferiority of mixed European types.

In our imagination the local racial types of Europe have been identified with the modern nations, and thus the supposed hereditary characteristics of the races have been confused with national characteristics. An identification of racial type, of language, and of nationality has been made, that has gained an exceedingly strong hold on our imagination. In vain sober scientific thought has remonstrated against this identification; the idea is too firmly rooted. Even if it is true that the blond type is found at present preeminently among Teutonic people, it is not confined to them alone. Among the Finns, Poles, French, North Italians, not to speak of the North African Berbers and the Kurds of western Asia, there are many individuals of this type. The heavy-set, dark East-European type is common to many of the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe, to the Germans of Austria and southern Germany, to the North Italians, and to the French of the Alps and of central France. The Mediterranean type is spread widely over Spain, Italy, Greece, and the coast of Asia Minor, without regard to national boundaries.

In western Europe, types are distributed in strata that follow one another from north to south,—in the north the blonde, in the center a dark, short-headed type, in the south the slightly built Mediterranean type.

National boundaries in central Europe, on the other hand, run north and south: and so we find the  Rh