348 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



characters. Typical specimens have tall and massive frames, fair 

 complexions, blue eyes, and yellow or reddish hair that is to say, 

 they are pronounced blonds. Their skulls are long, in the sense 

 that the breadth is usually less, often much less, than four fifths 

 of the length, and they are usually tolerably high. But in this 

 last respect they vary. Men of this blond, long-headed race 

 abound from eastern Prussia to northern Belgium ; they are met 

 with in northern France and are common in some parts of our 

 own islands. The people of Teutonic speech, Goths, Saxons, Ale- 

 manni, and Franks, who poured forth out of the regions bordering 

 the North Sea and the Baltic, to the destruction of the Koman 

 Empire, were men of this race ; and the accounts of the ancient 

 historians of the incursions of the Gauls into Italy and Greece, 

 between the fifth and the second centuries B. c, leave little doubt 

 that their hordes were largely, if not wholly, composed of similar 

 men. The contents of numerous interments in southern Scandi- 

 navia prove that, as far back as archseology takes us into the so- 

 called Neolithic age, the great majority of the inhabitants had the 

 same stature and cranial peculiarities as at present, though their 

 bony fabric bears marks of somewhat greater ruggedness and 

 savagery. There is no evidence that the country was occupied 

 by men before the advent of these tall, blond long-heads. But 

 there is proof of the presence, along with the latter, of a small 

 percentage of people with broad skulls skulls, that is, the breadth 

 of which is more, often very much more, than four fifths of the 

 length. 



At the present day, in whatever direction N we travel inland from 

 the continental area occupied by the blond long-heads, whether 

 southwest, into central France ; south, through the Walloon prov- 

 inces of Belgium into eastern France; into Switzerland, south 

 Germany, and the Tyrol ; or southeast, into Poland and Russia ; 

 or north, into Finland and Lapland, broad-heads make their ap- 

 pearance, in force, among the long-heads. And, eventually, we 

 find ourselves among people who are as regularly broad-heacled 

 as the Swedes and North Germans are long-headed. As a gen- 

 eral rule, in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and south Germany, 

 the increase in the proportion of broad skulls is accompanied by 

 the appearance of a larger and larger proportion of men of brunet 

 complexion and of a lower stature ; until, in central France and 

 thence eastward, through the Cevennes and the Alps of Dauphiny, 

 Savoy, and Piedmont, to the western plains of north Italy, the 

 tall blond long-heads * practically disappear, and are replaced by 



* I may plead the precedent of the good English words " block-head " and " thick- 

 head" for "broad-head" and "long-head," but 1 can not say that they are elegant. I 

 might have emploj-ed the technical terms brachycephali and dolichocephali. But it can 

 not be said that they are much more graceful ; and, moreover, they are sometimes em- 



