THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 479 



parable with that of France.* Bellio has distributed the poets, 

 painters, and sculptors of antiquity according to their place of birth, 

 over a map of that country. The effect has been to emphasize the 

 enormous preponderance of artistic genius all through the north, 

 from Tuscany to the Alps. How does this coincide with our pre- 

 vious deduction concerning France? It seems, perhaps, to corrobo- 

 rate the relation of Teutonism to art, until we recall the fact that all 

 northern Italy is overwhelmingly Alpine by race, as compared with 

 the artistically sterile south. Couple with this the fact that in 

 reality Teutonism is a negligible factor in Italy, physically speaking, 

 and that precisely the same ethnic type in France, which is so fecund 

 culturally in Italy, is the one localized wherever art is not; and all 

 doubt as to the predominant cause of the phenomenon is dissipated. 

 We see immediately that the artistic fruitfulness in either case is the 

 concomitant and derivative product of a highly developed center of 

 population. Contact of mind with mind is the real cause of the 

 phenomenon. 



This mode of destructive criticism, appeal to the social geography 

 of other countries wherein the ethnic balance of power is differently 

 distributed, may be directed against almost any of the phenomena 

 we have instanced in France as seemingly of racial derivation. In 

 the case either of suicide or divorce, if we turn from France to Italy 

 or Germany, we instantly perceive all sorts of contradictions. The 

 ethnic type which is so immune from propensity to self-destruction 

 or domestic disruption in France, becomes in Italy most prone to 

 either mode of escape from temporary earthly ills. For each phe- 

 nomenon culminates in frequency in the northern half of the latter 

 country, stronghold of the Alpine race. Nor is there an appreciable 

 infusion of Teutonism, physically speaking, herein, to account for 

 the change of heart. Of course, it might be urged that this merely 

 shows that the Mediterranean race of southern Italy is as much less 

 inclined to the phenomenon than the Alpine race in these respects, as 

 it in turn lags behind the Teuton. For it must be confessed that even 

 in Italy neither divorce nor suicide is so frequent anywhere as in Teu- 

 tonic northern France. Well, then, turn to Germany. Compare its 

 two halves in these respects again. The northern half of the empire 

 is most purely Teutonic by race; the southern is not distinguishable 

 ethnically, as we have sought to prove, from central France. Ba- 

 varia, Baden, Wurtemberg are no more Teutonic by race than 

 Auvergne. Do we find differences in suicide, for example, follow- 

 ing racial boundaries here? Far from it; for Saxony is its culminat- 

 ing center; and Saxony, as we know, is really half Slavic by heart, 



* Rapporti fra l'etnografia antica dell' Italia e la sua produttiva artistica, Boll. Soc. 

 geog. Italiana, Roma, xxiii, 1886, pp. 261-2*79, maps. 



