XIV.] THE CAUCASIC PEOPLES. 531 



been nearly absorbed by the British Teutons, that is to say, 

 assimilated in speech to the English and Lowland Scotch in- 

 truders, who began to arrive late in the i2th century, and are 

 now chiefly massed in Ulster, Leinster, and all the large towns. 

 The rich and highly poetic Irish language, which has a copious 

 medieval literature deeply interesting to folklorists and even 

 ethnologists, has not I believe been used for strictly literary pur 

 poses since the translations of Homer and of Moore's Melodies 

 by the late Archbishop McHale of Tuam. 



In Scotland few ethnical changes or displacements have 

 occurred since the two great political settlements. 

 first by the Scottish vanquishing of the Picts, and Sc ^nd. nS '" 

 then by the English (Angle) occupation of the 

 Lothians. The Grampians have during historic times formed 

 the main ethnical divide between the two elements, and brooklets 

 which can be taken at a leap are shown where the opposite banks 

 have for hundreds of years been respectively held by formerly 

 hostile, but now friendly communities of Gaelic and broad Scotch 

 speech. Here the chief intruders have been Norwegians, whose 

 descendants may still be recognised in Caithness, the Hebrides, 

 and the Orkney and Shetland groups. Faint echoes of the old 

 Norrena tongue are said still to linger amongst the sturdy Shet- 

 landers, whose assimilation to the dominant race began only after 

 their transfer from Norway to the Crown of Scotland. 



We have now all the elements needed to unravel the ethnical 

 tangle of the present inhabitants of the British Isles. 

 The astonishing prevalence everywhere of the mode- stitution of 



rately dolicho heads is at once explained by the 



absence of brachy immigrants except in the Bronze 



period, and these could do no more than raise the cephalic index 



from about 70 or 72 to the present mean of about 78. With the 



other perhaps less stable characters the case is not always quite 



as the Irish. On appeal to Rome they received a bishop of their own race and 

 also a Cathedral, whence the curious fact that to this day Dublin is almost the 

 only city in Christendom blessed with two medieval Cathedrals, St Patrick's 

 originally for the Irish and Christchurch for the Danes. These having both 

 been "confiscated" at the Reformation, a third has had to be erected for the 

 community that remained loyal to the old faith. 



342 



