UPON THE SERIES OF PHEHISTORIC CRANIA. 681 



may have been but repetitions of prehistoric invasions of the 

 bronze period, of, in other words, earlier ' Wiking-ziig-e.' This 

 being so, it becomes of consequence to recollect that though the 

 ancients, the contemporaries of the Cimbrie invaders, differ as to 

 speaking of them as ' Gauls ' or ' Germans,' they are unanimous 

 as to describing them as light-haired and blue-eyed, as well as tall 

 of stature, in comparison at least with the Italian population, 

 Horace's line, ' Nee fera cserulea domuit Germania pube ' (Epod. 

 xvi. 7), being supported by parallel ^ passages nearly infinite in 

 multitude. 



I have already remarked^ pp. 628-629 snjyra, that intermediate 

 forms, belonging distinctively to neither the one nor the other of 

 the two great types of dolicho-cephaly or brachy-cephaly, are 

 not common in these series. In the skulls of the stone ajre in 

 Great Britain we find no unambiguous traces at all of any 

 admixture with the brachy-cephalic type ; and even amongst 

 skulls from barrows of the bronze age^, when the two races were 

 living and dying together, it is rare to find skulls which combine, 

 as the ' Mischformen ' of the German anthropologists do, the 

 contour and picturesque peculiarities of the one tj'pe with the 

 proportions and measurements of the other. Still such forms are 

 to be found, and there are two principal varieties of skull from the 

 later period, the existence of which it is perhaps better explained 

 by the hypothesis of their being the result of intercrossing than in 

 any other way. And, firstly, I should be inclined to consider the 

 very large size ^ of certain crania of the bronze j^eriod as due to an 



1 For these see Ukert's Germania, pp. 198, 199, 345, 347, 348, 353, 362 ; Zeuss, Die 

 Deutschen, p. 51 j Perier, Fragments Ethnologiques, pp. 43-82 j Prichard, Physical 

 History, iii. 3rd ed. 1841, pp. 189-200. The Chevalier Bunsen is referred to by 

 Prichard as saying that he had ' often looked in vain for the auburn or golden locks 

 and the light cserulean eyes of the old Germans, and never verified the picture given 

 by the ancients of his countrymen till he visited Scandinavia, and that there he found 

 himself sun-ounded with the Germans of Tacitus.' Exact investigation has however 

 recently shown (see Virchow, p. 11, Beitrage zur physischen Anthropologic der 

 Deutschen, 1876, Berlin Abhandlungen) that the physical characteristics of light hair, 

 blue eyes, light skin, so constantly spoken of by the ancient writers, make up still no 

 less than 35'47 per cent, of the children at school in Prussia, though the proportion 

 falls to 20"36 i^er cent, in Bavaria, brunettes being in this latter country 21 '09 per 

 cent, against 11'63 in Prussia. 



- Without extending our view to the lower animals, it is easy to convince ourselves 

 that a great increase of size is very often at the present day a result of the inter- 

 crossing of two varieties of our own species. V. Baer, on the occasion of the famous 

 meeting of anthi-opologists at Gottingen in 1861 (see Zusammcnkunft einiger 

 Anthropologen, p. 22), drew attention to the increase of vigour which Baron Osten 

 Sacken had observed amongst North American half-breeds ; and Professor Daniel 

 Wilson, in his Memoirs on Hybridity, p. 27, 1875, writes with great particularity to 



