634 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



farther to the east, new light upon this point may be expected. It will 

 be asked at once why this primitive population should still lie bare 

 upon the surface, here along the lower Danube, when ifc has been 

 submerged everywhere else in Central Europe. Our answer is ready. 

 Here in this rich alluvial plain population might, expectedly, be 

 dense at a very early period. As we have observed before, such a 

 population, if solidly massed, opposes an enormous resistance to ab- 

 sorption by new-comers. A few thousand Bulgarian invaders would 

 be a mere drop in the bucket of such an aggregation of men. "We 

 are strengthened in this hypothesis that the dolichocephaly of the 

 Danubian plain is primitive, by reason of another significant fact 

 brought out by Bassanovitch.* Long-headedness is overwhelmingly 

 more prevalent among women than among men. The former repre- 

 sent more often what Bassanovitch calls the " dolichocephalic Thra- 

 cian type." The oval-faced Bulgarian woman among our portraits 

 would seem to be one of these. Now, in our treatment of the Jews,f 

 we have sought to illustrate the principle that in any population the 

 primitive type persists more often in the women. The bearing of 

 such a law in the case of the Bulgars would seem to be definite. Their 

 long-headedness, where it occurs, must date from a far more remote 

 period than the historic advent of the few thousand immigrants who 

 have given the name Bulgaria to the country. 



As for the other physical traits of the Bulgarians and Roumanians 

 there is little to be added. It goes without saying that they are both 

 deep brunets. Obedenare says the Roumanians are very difficult 

 to distinguish from the modern Spaniards and Italians. This is proba- 

 bly true in respect of brunetness. The Oriental cast of features of 

 our portraits, on the other hand, can not fail to attract attention. 

 More than two thirds of Bassanovitch's nineteen hundred and fifty- 

 five Bulgarians were very dark-haired. Light eyes were of course 

 more frequent, nearly forty per cent being classed as blue or greenish. 

 A few — about five per cent — were yellow or tawny-haired, these indi- 

 viduals being at the same time blue-eyed. This was probably Pro- 

 copius's excuse for the assertion that the Bulgars were of fair com- 

 plexion. He also affirmed that they were of goodly stature. This is 

 not true of either the modern Roumanians or Bulgars. They average 

 less than five feet five inches in height,:}: being considerably shorter 

 than the Turks, and positively diminutive beside the Bosnians and 



* 1891, p. 31. Women dolicho-, twenty-five per cent; meso-, forty-two pe- c*ut; 

 brachy-cephalic, thirty per cent ; while among men the percentages are 3, 16, and 81 ± 

 per cent respectively. 



f Popular Science Monthly, January, 1899, p. 350. 



\ Bassanovitch's series of 1,955 individuals averages only 1.638 metre. Op. cii., p. 30. 

 Auerbach, 1898, p. 259, gives an average of 1.63 metre for 880 Wallachians in Transyl- 

 vania. Obedenare, 1876, p. 374, states brown eyes to be most frequent in Roumania. 



