HOLMES DISTRIBUTION OF THE HUMAN RACE, 7 



Prof. Dawkins supposes that these skulls of the higher type 

 may have belonged to the ancestors of the Celts ; but the more 

 recent discussions of the French anthropologists, indicating the 

 existence of several distinct types rather than any one that might 

 be called Celtic, would seem to negative such an inference. In 

 some from the valley ot the Vezere, Dr. Broca finds certain pecu- 

 liarities in the anatomical structure, in respect of which they ap- 

 proach nearer to the gorilla than to modern men, while in other 

 points they differ more from the apes than do the present races. 

 M. Topinard* concludes that the dolichocephalic and platycepha- 

 lic type of the skulls of Canstadt, Eguisheim, &c., and of the 

 Neanderthal skull, was that of the oldest people whose bones 

 have yet been found in France ; that at the close of the Paleoli- 

 thic epoch a brachycephalic people appeared in France in small 

 numbers, and were followed by an invasion of dolichocephals 

 from the north, and that there was then another invasion of bra- 

 chycephals, at the close of the polished-stone epoch, along both 

 sides of the Alpine range, and that these people, mixing with the 

 original races, formed the Celtic type in central France. But, 

 considering that the remotest historical researches concerning 

 the Celts do not trace them back beyond the i6th century B.C., 

 and then exhibit them in a course of migration from the east, and 

 that these men of the Neolithic age must have been older by 

 incalculable centuries, any identification of them with the histo- 

 rical Celts becomes entirely imaginary, and must be deemed 

 quite inadmissible. 



Prof. Dawkins and some of the French ethnologists agree in 

 identifying the smaller race as the ancestors of the short, black- 

 haired, brown or swarthy people called Iberians or Basques ; and 

 this brown race is traced from the shores of the Mediterranean 

 Sea to the British Islands ; and they are considered to have been 

 the cousins, if not the direct descendants, of the brown race of 

 Northern Africa. That a brown race once occupied both shores 

 of the Mediterranean Sea, and were the ancestors of the Basques, 

 may be highly probable on many grounds ; but the identity of 

 this race with the small people of the Neolithic epoch may very 

 well be doubted until better evidence than any yet found has been 

 produced. 



* Anthropology. Trans, by R. T. H. Bartley, M.D. London, 1S7S. 



