630 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the primitive population of the Pyrenees; and the latter have 

 adopted the Basque language and customs : for they were penned 

 in by them all along the base of the mountains and had no other 

 option. This community of language and customs could not 

 fail to encourage intermarriage ; to the final end that to-day in 

 the mountains the Basque is considerably crossed, as our map 

 shows. In the plains, on the other hand, the line of demarca- 

 tion of blood is as sharp as that of speech. Purity of type on 

 this side was made possible by the political independence which 

 Basse-iSTavarre has always enjoyed. 



We have still to inquire as to the physical origin of this curi- 

 ous peo])le. We have traced them back to Spain. Whence did 

 they come into this country in the first place ? Are they of 

 African descent, following Broca's theory, or are they offshoots 

 from Mongolian stock as Pruner Bey would have it ? Or must we 

 class them with the lost tribes of Israel ? We already know the 

 physical type of the prehistoric Cro-Magnon race. Let us com- 

 pare it with our Vascons and test the theory of descent from it. 

 The Basque head is disharmonic that is, it is broad, while the 

 face is extraordinarily narrow. This is in contravention of the 

 general law that the face and the head usually participate alike 

 in the relative proportions of breadth and length. Thus, as our 

 portraits have shown, the broad-headed Alpine stock in B(?arn 

 has a round, short face; while the dolichocephalic population of 

 the Pyrenees, lying behind the Basque, has a correspondingly 

 long, oval visage. The Cro-Magnon race off'ers the only other 

 example of a widespread disharmonic head in Europe. Are our 

 Basques derived from this pure ethnic source ? Curiously enough, 

 these two cases of disharmonism so near to one another cross at 

 right angles. In the Basque the head is broad and the face nar- 

 row ; in the Cro-Magnon it is the head which is narrow while 

 the face is broad. In view of this flat contradiction, the hypothe- 

 sis of the Basque as a direct and pure descendant of the most 

 primitive prehistoric population of Europe becomes completely 

 untenable. Thus we dispose of one possible source for this people. 

 We have already rejected those based upon intermixture. The 

 broad head of our Basque with its narrow face is explained by 

 De Aranzadi, himself a Basque, by the supposition of an admix- 

 ture of Lapp blood to give the broad head with Iberian or Berber 

 blood for the narrow face. Modern research is, however, inimical 

 to such hasty assumptions of migrations across continents and 

 over seas : for the inertia of simple societies is immense. Causes 

 of variation nearer at home are regarded as more probable and 

 potent, and there is none more powerful than social selection. 



The difficulty of placing the Basque is solved by Dr. Collig- 

 non in a novel and yet simple way which has won favor already 



