MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



Descartes and Pascal (and even he was wrecked on the shoals 

 of religious polemics), whereas epigrammatists, essayists, writers 

 of memoirs and correspondence, chemists, and pure mathematicians 

 abound. With more outward polish French culture as a whole 

 penetrates perhaps less deeply through the social strata than does 

 the refinement of the English cultured classes. At the same time 

 the substantial qualities of patience, economy, and love of labour 

 cannot be denied to the French peasantry, who thus act as a 

 counterpoise to the extravagance and frivolity of urban life. By 

 hoarding their small savings, and by domestic thrift verging on 

 the sordid, they have made France one of the richest countries 

 in the world, better able than most others to survive tremendous 

 catastrophes and rise buoyantly above apparently overwhelming 

 disasters. Thanks to these qualities, combined with a pronounced 

 military spirit and love of conquest, the French people have played 

 a leading part in the world's history since remote times, and have 

 become an almost necessary element in the general progress of 

 humanity. Yet the future would seem to be for others, and 

 although the present alarming arrest of the population and other 

 symptoms of decadence may not be due to the absorption of the 

 upper in the lower strata alluded to above, the effects must be 

 far-reaching, and France would appear to have already been 

 outstripped in the race for the future political predominance 

 amongst the cultured peoples of the globe 1 . 



In Spain and Portugal we have again the same Ibero-Keltic 

 Th elements, but also again in different proportions and 



Spaniards and differently distributed, with others superadded- 



proto-Phoenicians and later Phoenicians (Cartha- 

 genians), Romans, Visigoths, Vandals, and still later Berbers and 

 Arabs. Here the Keltic- speaking round-heads intermingled in 

 prehistoric times with the long-headed Mediterraneans, an ethnical 

 fusion known to the ancients, who labelled it " Keltiberian." But, 

 as in Britain, the other intruders were mostly long-heads, with the 

 striking result that the Peninsula presents to-day exactly the 

 same uniform cranial type as the British Isles. Even the range 

 (76 to 79) and the mean (78) of the cephalic index are the same, 

 1 See my article on the Ethnology of France in Cassell's Storehouse, iv. p. 

 359- 



