SCIENCE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 31 



dominant race, descending through Central Europe, 

 was superimposed in Greece on earlier inhabitants 

 among whom men of the Mediterranean stock pre- 

 dominated ; while in Asia Minor, and some of the 

 islands of the ^Egean Sea, it encountered chiefly Alpine 

 or Armenoid peoples, mingling with the darker folk 

 only on the coast-line. The so-called Minoan civiliza- 

 tion, of which the centre point seems to have been 

 discovered in the excavations of Cnossus in Crete, 

 may have represented the earliest achievements of 

 the Mediterranean peoples. It seems to have been 

 influenced considerably by Egyptian culture ; while 

 the contemporary and succeeding bronze age, with a 

 civilization which seems to start at an advanced stage 

 of development in some of the cities of the mainland 

 and the islands, has been associated with men of the 

 round-skulled type and may represent an early descent 

 of the Alpine stock, driven forward by the Northern 

 race, who were shortly to follow on their footsteps. 



As we have said, the Mediterranean folk were and 

 are dark-haired and long-headed, while their Northern 

 conquerors were fair-haired and long-skulled. The 

 Mediterraneans buried their dead, while the heroes 

 of Homer, like the warriors of the North, passed to 

 the other world amid the flames of a funeral pyre. If 

 this hypothesis be correct, the peoples of ancient 

 Greece consisted of much the same elements, but in 

 different proportions, as those of England when the 

 earlier dark race had been overlaid by the influx of 

 Saxon and Dane and Northman ; and a natural 

 affinity of thought and outlook might be anticipated 

 therefrom. Moreover, the stimulus of an expanding 

 colonial dominion is common to both. The chiefs 



