ORIGIN OF BLOND EUROPEANS BLOCH. 611 



Herodotus does not mention the physical appearance of the Celts, 

 but he describes a people, in the north of the Black Sea and beyond 

 it in Scythia, who painted themselves red and green, which he caDs 

 Budini and which he distinguishes from the Scythian laborers and 

 others. ''They were," he says, ''a large and numerous people." 

 (IV, 21 and 108.) This proves that there then existed in Russia a 

 really red or blond race. But who were these reds ? It could not 

 have been the Celts, for they dwelt farther west; nor were they the 

 Firms; but they were an autochthonous (indigenous) race of Russia 

 as we know from the skidls found in the same region. 



The name Celt is also employed by Aristotle (384-322 B. C), 

 who knew that there were Celts in Spain, that Celts had captured 

 Rome, etc., but he also makes the important statement that the ass 

 did not exist in Scythia nor in the Celtic land because that animal 

 could not well withstand the cold. (Hist. Anim., Book VIII, Chapter 

 XXIII § 7). 



There is no doubt that the question here concerns the primitive 

 Celtic country, which adjoined Scythia, at the period when the Celts, 

 possessors of amber, were a river-shore people of the Baltic. 



Moreover, all the peoples of the north, says Strabo (VT, 2), were in- 

 cluded by the ancient Greek historians under the name of Celts or 

 Celto-Scythians. But the oldest name which the Greeks gave the 

 Celts was that of Hyperboreans. It is thus seen that by the name 

 Celts were meant people of the north, and consequently they could 

 not have been an aboriginal race of Gaul, as even some modern writei-s 

 still assume. 



But where did the Hyperboreans live? "I have no hesitation," 

 says Prof. JuUian, *' in recognizing in the H}^erboreans of Herodotus 

 (IV, 33) the Esths, the Aesti of Samland (Gulf of Danzig), the country 

 of amber (Tacitus, Germania, 45), and in these last the remnants of a 

 pre-Germanic agricultural and trading people."^ 



Let us add, moreover, that though the north of Europe was inac- 

 cessible to the ancients because of the immense expanse of the 

 Rhipaian and Plercynian Mountains, it was nevertheless explored 

 by sea in the fourth century B, C-., by Pytheas who skirted Europe 

 from Gades to the mouth of the Elbe and perhaps even as far as the 

 Tanais (Don). It was there that he fixed the division of the (^eltic 

 land from Scythia. 



The Celts were called Galatians by the Greeks, whereas the Romans 

 named them Gauls (Galli) upon their arrival in the valley of the Po 

 in the sixth century B. C. 



The three names, Celts, Galatians, and Gauls, are, then, synony- 

 mouSj pertaining to one and the same race, whose characteristics, 



1 Jullian. Histoire dc la Gaule. Three volumes, Paris, 1909. The primitive history of the Celts should 

 be read in this remarkable work. See also on this subject a letter of the author to the Revue de I'Ecole 

 d' Anthropologic, 1893. 



