THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 739 



in this great plain country; tliej have taken on and put off customs, 

 language, and religion time and again, according to circumstances. 

 The latter characteristic, religion, in fact, affords us a far better 

 standard for ethnic classification than language, for the Finns have 

 persisted in Christianity, the Turks and Tatars have held to Mo- 

 hammedanism, and the Mongols proper to Buddhism, with a remark- 

 able constancy. The varying proportions of barbarism in each group 

 are well illustrated by this fact; for in race, as in religion, the 

 Finns are truly indigenous to western Europe, the Tatar-Turks are 

 Oriental, while the Mongols proper are Asiatic. 



The evils incident to any linguistic classification of the aborigines 

 in Kussia are best illustrated by a comparison of the Lapps with the 

 Livs, Eths, and Tchouds of the Baltic provinces; both groups alike 

 speak Finnic languages; the j)hilologists, therefore, from Castren to 

 Mikkola, class them as alike members of a Finnic " race," along with 

 the Magyars or Hungarians, who are also Finnic in speech. ISTothing 

 could be more absurd than to assert a community of physical origin 

 for the three. The Magyars, among the finest representatives of a 

 west European type, are no more like the Lapps than the Australian 

 Bushmen; and the Baltic Finns are equally distinct. The Lapps, as 

 our portraits illustrate, are among the broadest-headed people in the 

 world.* Their squat faces show it. In stature they are among the 

 shortest of the human species. Virchow's celebrated hypothesis that 

 they are a " pathological race " seems excusable on this ground. 

 Their hair and eyes are very dark brown, often black. Could any 

 type of human beings be further removed from this than the Finns 

 described to us by G. Retzius, Bonsdorff, Eliseef, or Mainof ? These 

 latter are among the tallest of men, with fair skin, flaxen or tow- 

 colored hair, and blue eyes. Turn to our map on the next page. 

 It shows us among the Esths, on the Baltic coast, through the 

 Cheremisse on the Volga, and clear beyond the Ural Mountains 

 among Ostiaks and Voguls in Siberia, a long-headedness not a 

 whit less pronounced than throughout Teutonic Germany. The 

 contrast of tints on our map corresponds to a radical contrast 

 of physical type. 



Turning to the Russian aborigines, then, with an eye single to 

 their purely physical characteristics, we may relegate them to two 

 groups, sharply distinguished in isolation, but intermixed along their 

 lines of contact. Our map of cephalic index herewith will roughly 



his work, and Keane, 1886, and in his Ethnology, 1896, pp. 803 et seq., are equally at sea. 

 Since the days of Xilsson and Prichard, the philologists have befogged the questions of 

 physical descent. Niederle, 1896, in his appendix upon the subject, seems to be very con- 

 fused. Topinard, Anthropology, p. 465, has alone avoided the prime difficulty. 

 * Sommier, Kelsief, Kharuzin, Garson, and others have studied them in detail. 



