EARLY INHABITANTS OF WESTERN ASIA—LUSCHAN. 565 
Two other sects that are now to be mentioned, the Druses and 
the Maronites, show in the same way how religious seclusion tends 
to preserve old physical types. 
P. DRUSES. 
In the south of Beyrout a great part of the Lebanon and Antili- 
banos country is inhabited by about 150,000 Druses, who down to 
our days are to a certain extent independent of the Ottoman Govern- 
ment and enjoy a good many privileges. 
Their secret creed has been studied best by S. de Sacy in 1838, 
and contains, mixed with Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan ele- 
ments, a great many pantheistic conceptions, together with curious 
ideas on metempsychosis and the repeated incarnation of God, and 
with remains of the old Oriental worship of Nature. They speak 
Arabic and pass officially as ‘‘Mohammedans,”’ having Islamic names, 
but they have no inner connection with the religion of Mohammet. 
Max y. Oppenheim ? believes the Druses to be the descendants of 
‘“‘Arabs,’’ immigrated about A. D. 800. 
This hypothesis probably conforms to local tradition, but is in 
direct contradiction to the general impression we get from Druses 
and from Arabs, and from the result of anthropometric researches. 
I measured 59 adult male Druses, and not one single man fell, as 
regards his cephalic index, within the range of the real Arab. 
The Druses are all hyper-brachycephalic, with an index oscillating, 
like that of the Bektash, between 84 and 89 only, with one single 
exception, an old mischievous and half idiotic pensioner, who pre- 
tended to have once been first keeper of the Imperial Plate in Con- 
stantinople, and to be a real incarnation of Ali. His index was 76 
without a suspicion of synostotic sutures; but he had gray eyes, 
and fell in many other respects so fully out of the line of the homo- 
geneous rest of my Druses, that it seems safe to drop him entirely. 
The index of the auricular height ranges from 74 to 84 and the 
facial index from 79 to 92, with a distinct maximum of 86, with 14 
men in 58. 
Q. MARONITES. 
The northern neighbors of the Druses are the Maronites, Christians, 
generally said to be the descendants of a Monophysite sect, separated 
from the common Christian Church after the Council of Chalcedon in 
A. D. 451. Now, this council is certainly of the very greatest import- 
ance for ecclesiastical history, as it caused the schism between the 
Oriental world and the Occidental: the Greek, the Armenian, and 
the Coptic Church separated from the Roman, because the simple 
understanding and the sound common sense of the Orientals preferred 
1 Exposé de la religion des Druses, vol. 2, Paris, 1838. 
2, Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf, Berlin, D. Reimer, 1899, vol. 1, p. iiiss. 
