THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 309 



mediate types? Here also all individual variations occur, seemingly 

 in utter defiance of any law. The Italian is as apt to be straight- 

 haired as the Norwegian; in either nation the curly variety seems 

 to occur sporadically. Yet common observation, to say nothing of 

 microscopical examination, would naturally class the population of 

 Europe among the fine-textured, wavy-haired races of the earth. 

 One never sees the wiry form so familiar in the American Indian, 

 or the frizzle of the full-blooded negro. Are we to infer from this 

 that the people of Europe, therefore, are, like the Polynesians and 

 Australians, the result of an ethnic cross between other more primary 

 types? Certainly the study of the head form, with every extreme 

 known to man within the confines of the single continent, seems to 

 discredit this possibility. The only alternative is to consider this 

 texture of hair to be a more liquid characteristic, so to speak, than 

 the shape of the head; in other words, to assume that a few drops 

 of alien blood might suffice to produce an intermediate texture of the 

 hair, and yet not be adequate to modify the head form. If this were 

 indeed so, then we might imagine that, even while our three Euro- 

 pean races have kept reasonably distinct in head form, intermixture 

 has nevertheless taken place to some extent in every nook and corner 

 of the continent; and that this infinitesimal crossing has been enough 

 to modify the hair texture. But we are now wandering off into 

 vague hypothesis. There is yet enough that is positively known to 

 demand our attention without indulging in speculation. We have 

 stated the situation ; let the reader draw his own conclusions. 



II. The earliest and lowest strata of population in Europe were 

 extremely long-headed; probability points to the living Mediter- 

 ranean type as most nearly representative of it to-day. 



Of these most primitive races, coexisting with a fauna and flora 

 now extinct or migrated with change of climate from central and 

 western Europe, oftentimes no remains exist except the skulls by 

 which to judge of their ethnic affinities. We know more, in fact, 

 concerning their culture than their physical type in the earlier stone 

 age at least; but it is nevertheless established beyond all question 

 that they were dolichocephalic, and that, too, to a remarkable degree. 

 This feature characterized all subdivisions of the populations of 

 this epoch. Many varieties have been identified by specialists, such 

 as the stocky, short-statured Neanderthal type and the taller and 

 more finely molded Cro-Magnon race. The classification of each 

 nation differs in minor details, but they all agree in this, that the 

 population both of the early and the late stone age was long-headed 

 to an extreme. 



The present unanimity of opinion among archseologists concern- 

 ing this earliest dolichocephalic population is all the more remark- 



