528 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



different type, tall (5 ft. 8 in.) and round-headed (83), who also 

 built round barrows, whence Thurnam's dictum: "long-barrow, 

 long skull ; round-barrow, round skull." Later research has 

 mainly confirmed this ethnic law, although it is not to be sup- 

 posed that the Neolithic race had died out or been extirpated 

 by their successors. Some are, on the contrary, found buried 

 with them in the same barrows, and Dr Garson shows that the 

 Neolithic element survives to this day in the British Isles 1 . In 

 fact it would appear to have already largely absorbed the Bronze 

 element before it was reinforced later by the historical long-heads : 

 " This broad-headed invasion is the only case where such an ethnic 

 element ever crossed the English Channel in numbers sufficient 

 to affect the physical type of the aborigines. Even here its 

 influence was but transitory ; the energy of the invasion speedily 

 dissipated : for at the opening of the historic period, judged by 

 the sepulchral remains, the earlier [dolichoj types had consider- 

 ably absorbed the new-comers' 2 ." 



Whence came these tall round-heads ? Some with Dr Rolleston 3 

 would bring them from Scandinavia, where there is certainly a 

 somewhat puzzling brachy element both along the south-west 

 coast of Norway and in Denmark. But in that case they must 

 have spoken some early Low German dialect, of which there are no 

 clear traces in the tribal and place names of the Bronze Age. At 

 that time Britain seems to have belonged entirely to the domain 

 of Keltic speech 4 , nor could there be any hesitation in identifying 



1 Nature, Nov. 15 and 22, 1894. ; Ripley, p. 153. 



:! T. V. Holmes describes them as "taller, stronger and much rougher in 

 appearance, with large frontal sinuses and supra-orbital ridges, prominent cheek- 

 bones and heavy jaws" (Notes on the Evidence bearing on British Ethnology, 

 1886), and he quotes Rolleston (British Barrows, p. 680) : "The Briton of the 

 round-barrow period almost certainly presented much the same combination 

 of physical peculiarities as the modern Finn and Dane"; hence the inference 

 that the Bronze people were men from what is now Denmark, but "of Finnish 

 and not Teutonic affinities" (p. 5). But we now know that there were no 

 Finns west of the Gulf of Finland till quite late times (see Chap. IX. p. 334). 

 Still the question is beset with difficulties, and the British round-heads seem 

 undoubtedly to resemble those of the Danish Neolithic Age more than they 

 do de Lapouge's H. Alpimis, and much more than those of the Disentis type. 



4 Even the intruding Belgae, referred to by Caesar (B.C. v. 12), and no doubt 

 originally of Teutonic speech, seem to have soon been Kelticised. 



