^ 



THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 459 



posed its official speech upon the people, where it remains to-day. 

 Were the present Spanish nation old enough and sufficiently uni- 

 fied ; were the component parts of it more firmly knitted together 

 by education, modern means of transport, and economic interests ; 

 this disunity of speech might disappear. Unfortunately, the 

 character of the Iberian Peninsula is such arid, infertile, and 

 sparsely populated in the interior that these languages socially 

 and commercially turn their backs to one another. Of necessity, 

 they do this also along the frontier between Spain and Portugal. 

 The eyes of each community are directed not toward Madrid, but 

 toward the sea ; for there on the fertile littoral alone, is there 

 the economic possibility of a population sufficiently dense for uni- 

 fication. Thus the divergence of language is truly the expression 

 of natural causes working through political ones, which promise 

 to perpetuate the differences for some time. As for the Basques, 

 they have been politically independent both of the French and 

 the Spaniards until within a few years, and have been enabled to 

 preserve their unique speech largely for this reason. But now 

 that their political autonomy has begun to disappear, the official 

 Spanish is pressing the Basque language so forcibly that it seems 

 to be everywhere on the retreat. 



We have seen that community of language is often imposed 

 as a result of political unity. But it is, after all, rather a by- 

 product, so that it often fails even here to indicate nationality. 

 Its irresponsibility in respect both of nationality and of race is 

 clearly indicated by the present linguistic status of the British 

 Isles.* As our map shows, the Keltic language is now spoken in 

 the remote and mountainous portions of Wales, Scotland, and Ire- 

 land, as well as across the English Channel in French Brittany. 

 Are we to infer from this that in these several places we have to 

 do with vestiges of a so-called Keltic race which possesses any 

 physical traits in common ? Far from it ! For, although in a 

 few places racial differences occur somewhere near the linguistic 

 frontiers, as in Wales and Brittany, they are all the more mis- 

 leading elsewhere for that reason. Within the narrow confines 

 of this spoken Keltic language are to be found populations char- 

 acterized by all the extremes of the races of Europe. The dark- 

 haired, round-faced Breton peasant speaking the Kymric branch 

 of the Keltic tongue is, as we shall hope to demonstrate, physic- 

 ally as far removed from the Welshman who uses the same lan- 

 guage, as from the tall and blue-ej^ed Norman neighbor in France 



* For exact details and maps of the spoken languages, vide Ravenstein in Journal of 

 the Royal Statistical Society, London, vol. slii, p. 579, for Great Britain. The limits in 

 France are mapped in Memoires de la Societe d'Anthropologie, Paris, series i, iii, pp. 147 seq. 

 The place names are mapped in Canon Taylor's Names and Places. Also Bull. Soc, 1878, 

 p. 236. 



