"PROFESSOR RIDGEWAY AND RACIAL ORIGINS" 127 



races are supposed to have been overrun by the Aryans, who 

 when these theories were first started were universally con- 

 sidered to have come from the Hindu Kush, but are now 

 generally believed (as held by Latham) to have originated in 

 Upper Central Europe. The Aryans were generally assumed 

 to have a blond complexion. 



In my Early Age of Greece (1901) I had refused to regard 

 the short-skulled Alpine race as differing materially on the one 

 hand from the dark, long-headed race found in Italy, Greece 

 and Spain, and on the other from the blond race of Northern 

 Europe. At the York meeting of the British Association I 

 maintained that the "Alpine" race was in no sense Mongoloid 

 and that its short skull was due to modification along the Alps ; 

 in other words, that the brachycephalic race found in Europe 

 is of European and not of Asiatic origin. This view was later 

 on supported by Prof. William Wright in his Hunterian 

 Lectures, whilst it has recently been strongly expressed by 

 Prof. Gustave Retzius of Stockholm in his Huxley Memorial 

 Lecture, delivered last December before the Royal Anthropo- 

 logical Institute. Moreover, in the most recent publication of 

 the Danish Anthropological Committee, Dr. Soren Hansen has 

 drawn the conclusion, from the very complete data obtained 

 from the Anthropological Survey of Denmark, that the doctrine 

 with which the Danish investigators started — that the popula- 

 tion of Denmark consisted of two distinct elements: (i) a tall 

 blond race with long skulls, and (2) a short dark race with 

 short skulls — must be rejected. The evidence points rather to 

 a shading off from the dark short type into the tall blond type. 



In my address I maintained, as also in a monograph (" Who 

 were the Romans?" — British Academy 1907), that the blond 

 tall race of Upper Europe is identical in origin with the small 

 dark long-headed race of the three southern peninsulas of 

 Europe, generally included up till then under the name of 

 "Mediterranean Race" with the Hamites of North Africa and 

 the Semites of South-western Asia. 



My argument was, and is, that as the ice-sheet receded man 

 passed upwards from the south-east into Europe and settled in 

 the three southern peninsulas, gradually spreading northwards 

 over the Alps and eventually extending up to the Baltic. As 

 they gradually spread upwards, under the influence of their 

 environment (and in environment I of course include food). 



