474 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



course, partly due to the concentration of population in cities along 

 the river; for divorce is always more frequent in urban than in rural 

 communities. The same consideration may also be important along 

 the Mediterranean coast, for a large part of the population is here 

 aggregated in cities, for peculiar reasons which will appear in due 

 time. Even more strikingly the great basin of the Seine, center of 

 Teutonic racial characteristics, stands sharply marked off from the 

 whole south. This is most important of all. 



Do the facts instanced above have any ethnic significance? Do 

 they mean that the Alpine type, as a race, holds more tenaciously 

 than does the Teuton to its family traditions, resenting thereby the 

 interference of the state in its domestic institutions? A foremost 

 statistical authority,* Jacques Bertillon, has devoted considerable 

 space to proving that some relation between the two exists. Con- 

 fronted by the preceding facts, his explanation is this: that the 

 people of the southern departments, inconstant perhaps, and fickle, 

 nevertheless are quickly pacified after a passionate outbreak of any 

 kind. Husband and wife may quarrel, but the estrangement is dis- 

 sipated before recourse to the law can take place. On the other 

 hand, the Norman or the Champenois peasant, Teutonic by race, 

 cold and reserved, nurses his grievances for a long time; they abide 

 with him, smoldering but persistent. " Words and even blows 

 terminate quarrels quickly in the south; in the north they are settled 

 by the judge." From similar comparisons in other European coun- 

 tries, M. Bertillon draws the final conclusion that the Teutonic race 

 betrays a singular preference for this remedy for domestic ills. It 

 becomes for him an ethnic trait. 



Another social phenomenon has been laid at the door of the Teu- 

 tonic race of northern Europe; one which even more than divorce 

 is directly the concomitant of modern intellectual and economic prog- 

 ress. We refer to suicide. Morselli devotes a chapter of his inter- 

 esting treatise upon this subject f to proving that " the purer the 

 German race — that is to say, the stronger the Germanism (e. g., Teu- 

 tonism) of a country — the more it reveals in its psychical character 

 an extraordinary propensity to self-destruction." On the other 

 hand, the Slavic peoples seem to him to be relatively immune. 

 These conclusions he draws from detailed comparison of the distribu- 

 tion of suicide in the various countries of western Europe, and it 

 must be confessed that he has collected data for a very plausible case. 



* fitudes demographiques du divorce, Paris, 1883, pp. 42 seq. Turquan, in L'Economiste 

 Francais, October 26, 1889, gives parallel results for the first five years of the new divorce 

 law of 1884. 



f Suicide, in the International Scientific Series, New York, 1882. A. M. Guerry, Statis- 

 tique Morale, Paris, 1864, shows precisely the same thing. 



