352 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY. 



among those of central Asia, up to the frontiers of India on the 

 south and to the Pacific on the extreme east. Thus it is hardly 

 possible that fewer than three races should have contributed to 

 the formation of the Slavonic people ; namely, the blond long- 

 heads, the European brunet broad-heads, and the Asiatic brunet 

 broad-heads. And, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it 

 is certainly permissible to suppose that it is the first race which has 

 furnished the blond complexion and the stature observable in so 

 many, especially of the northern Slavs, and that the brunet com- 

 plexion and the broad skulls must be attributed to the other two. 

 But, if that supposition is permissible, then the Aryan form and 

 substance of the Slavonic languages may also be fairly supposed 

 to have proceeded from the blond long-heads. They could not have 

 come from the Asiatic brunet broad-heads, who all speak non- 

 Aryan languages ; and the presumption is against their coming 

 from the brunet broad-heads of the central European highlands, 

 among whom an apparently non- Aryan language was largely 

 spoken, even in historical times. 



In the same way, the tall blond tribes among the Finns may be 

 accounted for as the product of admixture. The great majority 

 of the Finno-Tataric people are brunet broad-heads of the Asiatic 

 type. But that the Finns proper have long been in contact with 

 the Aryans is evidenced by the many words borrowed from Aryan 

 which their language contains. Hence there has been abundant 

 opportunity for the mixture of races, and for the transference to 

 some of the Finns of more or fewer of the physical characters of 

 the Aryans, and vice versa. On any hypothesis, the frontier be- 

 tween Aryan and Finno-Tataric people must have extended across 

 west-central Asia for a very long period ; and at any point of this 

 frontier, it has been possible that mixed races of blond Finns or of 

 brunet Aryans should be formed. 



So much for the European people who now speak Celtic, or 

 Teutonic, or Slavonian, or Lithuanian tongues ; or who are known 

 to have spoken them before the supersession of so many of the 

 early native dialects by the Romance modifications of the lan- 

 guage of Rome. With respect to the original speakers of Greek 

 and Latin, the unraveling of the tangled ethnology of the Balkan 

 Peninsula and the ordering of the chaos of that of Italy are enter- 

 prises upon which I do not propose to enter. In regard to the first, 

 however, there are a few tolerably satisfactory data. The ancient 

 Thracians were proverbially blue-eyed and fair-haired. Tall blonds 

 were common among the ancient Greeks, who were a long-headed 

 people; and the Sphakiots of Crete, probably the purest repre. 

 sentatives of the old Hellenes in existence, are tall and blond- 

 But considering that Greek colonization was taking place on a 

 great scale in the eighth century B. c, and that, centuries earlier 



