THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 



621 



outsider. This is equally true in respect to customs and folklore ; 

 so that the Basque frontier can be detected all along the line 

 from village to village. The present boundary is of such a form 

 that it denotes a complete equality of the two rival tongues. It 

 has remained immovable for many generations. 



The clearness of this frontier in France is interestingly illus- 

 trated by a bit of detail on the accompanying map. It concerns 

 that loop which is roughly indicated upon the larger map just 

 east of Bayonne. Here at the village of La Bastide-Clairence for 

 generations has been a little tongue of Bearnais-French, penetrat- 

 ing deeply into Basque territory. The name of this town indi- 

 cates a fortress, and another "Bastide" occurs in the tongue 

 farther north. Broca inclines to the view that here was a bit of 

 territory in which the French patois was so strongly intrenched 

 that it held its own against the advancing Basque. It may have 

 been a reconquest, to be sure. For us, the sharpness of frontier 

 is the only point of concern, in contrast with the one in Spain. 

 It is an undoubted instance of linguistic invasion toward the 

 north. 



Another difficulty, no less insuperable than the fact that their 

 language was on the move in a quiescent population, lay in the 

 way of the old as- 

 sumptions that the 

 Basques were pure 

 and undefiled de- 

 scendants of some 

 very ancient people. 

 Study of the head 

 form precipitates us 

 at once into it. No 

 sooner did physical 

 anthropologists take 

 up the matter of 

 Basque origins than 

 they ran up against 

 a pair of bars. Study 

 of the cephalic in- 

 dex yielded highly 

 discordant results. 

 Those who, like Bro- 

 ca and Virchow, 



measured heads or skulls of the Basques in Spain, discovered a 

 dolichocephalic type, with an index ranging about 79 on the 

 living head. Equally positive were those like Pruner Bey, who 

 investigated the head form on the French slopes of the Pyrenees, 

 that the Basque was broad-headed. The indexes obtained in this 



Detail Basque-French Boundary. 



